Inside Obama’s HQ

Frederick Harris is walking through his front gate in Washington, D.C., after a morning coffee, when he spots me on his front steps, staring at my mobile phone. “Are you Frederick?” I say. “Depends who’s asking,” he replies warily, as you do to a strange man loitering by your front door.

I want to reply “Barack Obama” – and I would only be half-wrong.

It had taken all of a few minutes to download the app designed by President Obama’s re-election campaign at my kitchen table and have it guide me to Harris’s house a few blocks away, in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood.

One tap on the app’s icon for voter canvassing and the screen lights up with a street map dotted with small blue flags, marking the Democrats in the area his re-election campaign would like to have door-knocked. Tap on the flag, and the app brings up their address. Another tap and I have their first names, their age and their gender, as in “Frederick H., 75, M.”

Since its launch this year, anyone can download the “Obama for America” app and see the party affiliation of many of their neighbours, with the ages and exact addresses thrown in for good measure. Harris, who shares the house with his wife, seems nonplussed about any possible assault on his privacy and is happy to provide me with his full surname.

“If they are trying to identify sympathetic Democrats, they have got two in the cross hairs right here,” he says, of him and his wife. “Everything is an invasion of privacy these days. If I got excited about it, I would have had a coronary by now.”

Others are not so relaxed. At the home of 45-year-old “Deanne S.”, in the next block, the man who answers the door recoils as I try to show him his household’s details displayed on my mobile phone. “I am not sure she will talk to you,” he says, and shuts the door.

That kind of information is out there for everyone, pretty much. The DNC is just using it.

I don't have a problem with it because my info isn't in it and I don't support the DNC...I'd have a huge problem with it if it either were true

God, that's awful.

If any candidate supporter showed up at my door with that app, I'd be sure not to vote for that candidate.

I can't believe no one else has a problem with this.

Look, it's very simple.

When the one company made the app that scanned Facebook, FourSquare, and other social media sites for check-ins and tags and whatnot and allowed you to pinpoint people you designated as "friends" on your GPS-enhanced map on your phone... People were right to deem it a creepy application of public data to create a "Stalker App."

Similarly, this is a very insidious and abusive use of public voting information to collate it and put it readily in the hands of people with the implied encouragement to harass, accost, or solicit me based on the information. This is definitely not something an incumbent politician should be using his campaign's access to gov't resources to create and distribute.

The latter, DE.