The White House is ordering agencies to place its new app on all employees’ government phones
www.govexec.com
The newly created, often overtly political app places the Trump administration into unprecedented and “dangerous” territory, IT experts say.

The White House recently unveiled a new app to give the public “unfiltered” access to “key priorities,” “historic moments” and “policy breakthroughs.” Now, it’s directing agencies to help install it on the government phones of federal employees.

The Trump administration launched the app, which promises to “[keep] you connected to President Donald J. Trump and his administration like never before,” in March.

The push to install the app on the devices of millions of government employees drew surprise from current and former federal officials, who called the move highly unusual and even dangerous.

  • NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
    60·
    11 hours ago

    Here’s the summary of the app from a few months ago: https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

    1. Injects JavaScript into every website you open through its in-app browser to hide cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login walls, signup walls, upsell prompts, and paywalls.
    2. Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.
    3. Loads JavaScript from a random person’s GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app’s WebView.
    4. Loads third-party JavaScript from Elfsight (elfsightcdn.com/platform.js) for social media widgets, with no sandboxing.
    5. Sends email addresses to Mailchimp, images are served from Uploadcare, and a Truth Social embed is hardcoded with static CDN URLs. None of this is government infrastructure.
    6. Has no certificate pinning. Standard Android trust management.
    7. Ships with dev artifacts in production. A localhost URL, a developer IP (10.4.4.109), the Expo dev client, and an exported Compose PreviewActivity.
    8. Profiles users extensively through OneSignal - tags, SMS numbers, cross-device aliases, outcome tracking, notification interaction logging, in-app message click tracking, and full user state observation.