What are your adjectives? Your gender? Your competition and physical arrangement? Are you physically or mentally impaired? The Philadelphia Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity wants to know how they “better serve the Philadelphians.”
If you want to enroll in the state’s Political Engagement Academy Learning Series group titled,” Leading a Community Meeting,” please complete the following “optional statistical questions” on the type you need to submit. It promises to tell how to “host a productive meet and handle fight.” The form’s middle indicates that it is “powered by NGP VAN.”
Get Out the Democratic Voting
NGP-VAN is” the leading technology company to Democrat and liberal political campaigns and businesses, nonprofits, municipalities, and another groups”, according to its site. Through NGP-VAN, a senior legal brother with The Heritage Foundation, Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, has been collecting invasively specific information about its people for decades. The arrangement has raised” all kinds of potential legal issues,” according to Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal brother with The Federalist.
This same organization is now instructing social foot soldiers which residents to approach about election, using its Democrat-only MiniVAN program.
Democrats knock on Democrats ‘ doors all over the nation using MiniVAN. These individuals download a list of visitors to their devices as well as MiniVan. MiniVAN creates a map of lists and displays to volunteers the number of voters present. The game has a text to read and, crucially, a spot to add notes to get added to the Democrat information basic, such as whether a voter has been canvassed or has voted.
The app is currently receiving a lot of use in Philadelphia. NGO VAN recently revealed on social media that the MiniVAN app was used more frequently in Philadelphia than in other major cities nationwide earlier this month.
Everybody wants a piece of Pennsylvania, the purple battleground state with 19 coveted electoral votes. To win the Commonwealth, candidates need a strong showing in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs.
Imagine how useful it would be to have detailed information about voters, such as age, sex, and language. These indicators can tell which candidate a voter might support. If you are making a list of people to target for voter registration, mail-in voting, and ballot harvesting, this is the kind of data that can win elections.
Republican operatives in Pennsylvania who spoke on the phone say they use a different door-knocking app, but that Democrats have better data.
MiniVAN is also being used in other battleground cities. The top 10 cities with the highest use of the app earlier this month were Philadelphia, Chicago, Phoenix, Raleigh, Atlanta, New York City, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Boston, and Detroit, according to the report on X. The use of this app provides a clear indication of where Democrats are placing their foot forward.
NGP-VAN did not respond to a voicemail asking for a reporter’s interview for this story.
These Data Streams Are Connected By A Privacy Notice for a Single Company.
Philadelphians who visit the city’s websites soon discover ways to leak their personal information to NGP-VAN.
You have the option to disclose your occupation and employment status to the Office of Children and Families, for example. Want to receive emails from the Board of Ethics for the City of Philadelphia? Fill out a form by entering your email and postal code. Taking a course on how to work remotely with volunteers? That’s another form inviting users to fill out “optional demographic questions”, all connected to NGP-VAN.
And if filling out forms gets old, you can sign up for FastAction, a service powered in part by NGP-VAN that holds your information to populate forms automatically.
Users can uncheck a box on some Philadelphia forms to opt out of signing up for FastAction, a program NGP-VAN describes as a” safe and secure way for you to save your contact and payment information, allowing you to show your support in the future with a single click.”
Image CreditScreenshot
The goal of FastAction, which invites users to” show]their ] support with a single click”, is not simply to ease the user experience for the next time you fill out a form.
” FastAction , and , ActionID are powered by NGP VAN, Inc and EveryAction. We’re a leading technology provider to campaigns and organizations, offering clients an integrated platform of the best fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital, and social networking products”, the FastAction website says. Our goal is to build a support network that will aid in the success of our clients!
The FastAction privacy statement appears as you continue to click. It connects a lot of company names, chiefly Bonterra, the parent of them all.
” Bonterra LLC … is an online, cloud-based service platform that provides individuals and organizations the ability to contribute to, organize, and manage their causes”, the privacy policy explains. ” Bonterra Services include EveryAction, Mobilize, NGP VAN, CyberGrants, Network for Good, Social Solutions and the respective individualized service offerings thereunder”.
The 5, 000-word privacy notice is unlikely to be read by the majority of those who sign up for FastAction through NGP-VAN. They wo n’t likely make the case that NGP-VAN’s MiniVAN app might be able to access their private information provided by the city government once they have agreed to the policy.
The privacy policy tells users that the platform’s” Services”, which includes NGP-VAN, collect contact information, age, sex, “political and professional affiliations”, “interests in charitable causes”, occupation, the type of event you signed up for, the organizations affiliated with the event, whether you made a donation, and more.
According to the href=”https://www.bonterratech.com/legal/privacy-policy” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>privacy policy, the company may combine your information with information it gathers from third parties, such as public databases, to create a file on you with even more information than you initially gave it. It might even request access to or download your Google Sheets or Google Drive, or take data from your social networking sites.
” This allows us to configure your integration ( s ) in accordance with your preferences. We do n’t use this data for any other purposes, according to the privacy disclaimer. You agree to this when you sign up for FastAction.
The company uses the information in numerous ways, including to “facilitate your engagement” with the company and its organizations, and to” ]r ] ecommend opportunities to engage with other organizations and campaigns that use]their ] Services”, according to the privacy policy.
The data collection is widespread, going well beyond Philadelphia. Through a number of well-known Democrat political campaigns, the FastAction service can gather user data. It reaches across the country, collecting data through issues-based websites promoting partisan environmental concerns, advocating for abortion, and seeking fracking bans.
This untapped but vast network of data collection can be used to help Democrats win elections. Republicans do not appear to possess a similar level of sophistication.
Beth Brelje covers The Federalist’s elections coverage. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
