The Trump administration’s newly launched White House App is under scrutiny after a software developer claimed to have found embedded code that tracks users’ precise GPS coordinates every 4.5 minutes and automatically syncs them to a third-party server. The claim, posted on 28 March 2026 by the X account @Thereallo1026, has drawn nearly 260,000 views and prompted questions about data collection practices in government-operated applications.
The post included what appeared to be decompiled source code from the app, revealing what the user described as OneSignal’s ‘full GPS pipeline compiled in.’ According to the post, the code showed the app ‘polling your location every 4.5 minutes, syncing your exact coordinates to a third-party server.’ The White House has not publicly responded to the specific technical claims.
And by “White House App” I’m going to assume they mean Twitter, since the article is REALLY light on specifics.
No, there’s a new “Official” The White House app for Android / iOS.
If the gps data goes to a 3rd party I wonder who owns those servers. Palantir?
To be fair the type of person that would install a white house app probably needs to be tracked anyway.
This is tracking the press who need it for their job
If that were even remotely true hopefully the press is smart enough to install on a burner “work” phone that sits in their desk drawer, or on a secondary account that is logged out by default.
that would still require the OS or user to spoof a location to actually prevent tracking. I hope they’d do that, but I wouldn’t expect them to.
Which? Leaving it in a desk prevents tracking because the desk isn’t following you. Putting it on an account that is fully logged out by default means it only gets your location when you switch to that account (which you can control).
I have a separate user in GrapheneOS for service accounts like Amazon or my Philips Hue lights, and that account is fully blocked for running in the background. Once a month or so when I need one of those apps I’m sure they all phone home, but their data is heavily limited.
Is the app a requirement to get a press pass?
That’s probably why they did it. They know trump is most likely to be shot at by one of their own nuts.
According to the Google Play Store, there are 467 reviews (4.8 stars) but “0+” downloads. Like everything else about the White House, it doesn’t add up.
And maybe most people know to keep it off their phones.
It’s because there were SO many downloads, more than two BILLION I’m told, by some really fantastic people who made the app, this wonderful app, that we hit something called an INTEGER LIMIT. Can you believe that? We had so many of you GREAT Americans sign up, that it just completely broke the App Store. It’s just incredible.
/s
More like
We hit something called pulls up paper
int… inta… intajur? limit. what a word
8 bit I assume
One bit.
The Play Store has recently (I think about 3 years ago?) introduced delayed updates for things like download counts because they were battling faked statistics (e.g. the download counter could be manipulated by bot farms), so now downloads are accumulated and checked against users actually using the app and having it on their devices - which takes time to update so IIRC they now only update that counter every month. Hence the 0+ downloads.
So they’re verifying downloads, but not reviews?
Why would anyone install government shit on their phone
Don’t you follow and obey Orange Jesus?
From the US government, I completely agree. But a functional government helps and supports its citizens and there are plenty of ways an app on your phone can help. Admittedly that’s pretty ideological, but at the very least I’d argue there is a spectrum
It should just be a website and not something that needs to live on my phone 24/7
Oh yeah, I didn’t intend my comment to say that this specific app makes sense, just that some can
In a hypothetical socialist utopia with rigorously defined and enforced guarantees of rights and liberties, government-owned platforms can and should replace corporate-owned ones.
Imagine a concept like facebook/instagram/twitter, except it’s open-source and transparent, and its users are in control of its governance through direct democracy and collective ownership. Plus a set of rules defining explicitly what they can’t do, including all predatory, coercive, manipulative, and profiteering practices that are the industry standard now.
Obviously it’s not a simple solution. Government control ≠ fair, equitable, and transparent. That’s why I framed this as a hypothetical. It requires that socialist utopia, collective ownership, direct democracy, and open-source format. But it is possible, and we shouldn’t let our imaginations be hampered by what exists today, in this system.
So many things could be done better with centralized planning, but that depends on who is in charge of that planning. And that’s why we need direct democracy and collective ownership. Those things can actually be enabled by technology, despite the fact that technology is currently being used to hamper it.
Like, report a pothole on your maps app, and the state repairs it within a week. Go to the open forum section of your social media, and discuss the items on the upcoming bill proposal with the members of your community. Start a citizen’s initiative by filling out a simple form that’s accessible to everyone and posting it in the right section of the platform. Audit your local government’s budget/expenses as easily as navigating to the right tab.
There’s a better way of doing the things we’re already doing. We just have to dare to imagine, to believe, and to persevere until our vision becomes a reality.
What you wrote reminded me of a minor idea that’s been floating in my head: I kind of wish that more governments did something like requiring adding your business to OpenStreetMaps as part of registering the business with the government, or even just publishing the basic data (location, opening hours, …) somewhere that all the maps apps sync with
That would be cool, but isn’t OSM the one with the wonky governance issues? A bunch of devs split from them and forked the source code, which they now develop as CoMaps. It’s a much more solid option for that reason
From Wikipedia, not quite but I learnt so something, so thanks:
CoMaps is a community-driven, free and open-source, offline navigation app that uses map data from OpenStreetMap (OSM)
The CoMaps project was initiated in response to growing concerns and dissatisfaction within the Organic Maps community. The original Organic Maps project, while initially promoted as an open community effort, faced significant issues related to governance, transparency, and the potential for shareholder profit at the expense of the community.
Quite a few governments make it mandatory, either as an only way to complete a required process, or (like my govt) make any alternate options, like phone or Web, an absolute nightmare
509 reviews as I write this and still 0 downloads and zero of those 509 reviews have any text; just stars.
So their app description is lying?
Probably copy-pasted from some other app … which is also lying about data security.
Like how Truth Social is copy pasted from Mastodon.
The Trump regime, lying?
This is a thing unheard of!
Must be the Democrat’s fault somehow!
This is the kind of behavior I’d expect from this administration.
The bar is so low and they still manage to limbo under it
My favorite formulation is:
The bar was so low it was practically a tripping hazard in Hell, yet here you are, limbo dancing with the devil.
Lol I remember watching that YouTube video about a north Korean phone that took screenshots every few minutes.
Freedom™
Also Red Star OS
Its all projection from the west 🤷♀️
I thought of the one app India was trying to force all phones sold in the country to have. That one was also tracking locations.
Oh yeah! I forgot about that one. Crazy times ahead for everyone.
Microsoft Recall
The key difference is, instead of your data winding up in an oppressive, kleptocratic surveillance state, it goes to the oppressive, kleptocratic adtech industry (dw, your data is also still sent to the oppressive, kleptocratic surveillance state,)
dw, your data is also still sent to the oppressive, kleptocratic surveillance state
Oh thank God. You had me worried for a second there that Daddy Freedom and Mommy Liberty didn’t care about me anymore.
dw, your data is also still sent to the oppressive, kleptocratic surveillance state
But the good news is the government has to pay them our tax dollars to spy on us instead of getting it for free or using that money to benefit the populace. Yay dystopia!
That channel was Mrwhosetheboss
Freedom as a tag line not as a promise.
The funny thing is, THIS seems to be the part the media is rolling with, but if you read the full details about what it can do and how poorly it’s made, tracking your location is only one thing to worry about (though it’s a big one to be fair).
E.g The potential for running arbitrary malicious code if one random dude on the internet (who is unrelated to the US government) has his GitHub account compromised? Daaaaaaawg
People don’t store signing keys with source code
Or at least they shouldn’t.
People crawl GitHub for credentials and they are luck a lot.
It was already a no from me, dawg, you don’t have to convince me.
No, but seriously. Everything he tries to implement is like 90’S cartoon level evil and sloppy. I bet we could get him monologuing.
i installed it on my burner and it’s asking permission to check my buttholes
Did you accept?
Nah i sent them the photos years ago
Are you a preteen? If not then you’re not young enough for them to be interested in!!
No like they are really interesting. Every time I go to the doctor if there is someone new they beg to look up them.
I know I ended up being a really hard final exam question, but I may have been a famous case study and I’m not sure how to ask without it getting really weird.
I say no, by the way. You gotta pay if you want a peek
“I know what you’re going to say. What does the boob test tell you that the butthole test didn’t. He’s just being thorough.”
All 2+ of them?
yup all of them. it is not a gentle lover.
Are journalists required to download the shit App?
Who the actual fuck would install an app from lying scum dumpy? Holy shit.
Well ppl are actually installing the spyware thats my companies HR app. They simply dont know the extent
If you operate that within the EU, you better know what you are doing, hope it never gets leaked, or don’t do half of what you are implying here.
I love me some whistle-blowing!
if it’s a work phone, sure, I can understand. but if it’s a personal phone, do NOT conduct any work related stuff on it. Especially do NOT install any apps from. likewise, do NOT do any personal stuff on a work phone. Keep them completely separated. Just my 2c
On my first day at a new job in 1998, I watched a guy get escorted out of his office and the building carrying his stuff in a cardboard box. My use of the verb “escort” is ironic because it turned out that the guy had been running a prostitution ring. He’d gotten an 800 number that redirected to his office phone number, and he kept track of everything (names and phone numbers of his clients and girls and records of every arrangement) in a spreadsheet on his work computer. He only got busted because the company upgraded everybody’s PC and had techs look through all the old PCs to make sure nothing important was going to get deleted; this dude had named his spreadsheet something like “call girls.xls” and had it on his Windows desktop.
This seemed amazing to me, but after working there a few months I realized how somebody could get that sloppy. IT Security at this place was fucking lax. None of us programmers had an identifiable boss or anything like clearly-defined responsibilities, or even rigid work hours. I remember one stretch for about a month where in a room with 50 people in it, all everybody did all day was call into the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? hotline and try to get onto the show.
Unrelated prostitution story:
So there was big prostitution scandal in my medium sized city once, and it hit all the papers. The rings that get all the press are the ones that are run by a MADAM. Pimp-run prostitution is boring. Put a woman in charge, and it makes headlines.
It was literally front page news, so I come into work, and ask my office mate about it, and he says “I used to work with a guy with same last name [which was unusual], I wonder…” and he calls him.
Was that guy pissed! As he said at the top of his lungs so even I could even hear it: “THAT’S MY EX-WIFE. THE FUCKING BITCH STARTED A PROSTITUTION RING USING MY FAMILY NAME!”
Dude, seriously. Work phone/personal phone. The two never touch in any way, not even for so much as alternate contact method. I don’t want my bank calling my work phone. I don’t want my clients calling my personal. When Im not working the work phone gets set down next to the bed and doesn’t get picked up again until the next time Im getting up and ready for work.
I truly do not understand how people can even tolerate having both of these parts of their lives on the same device. Is the hardship of two phones really that insurmountable for people when the benefits are so readily apparent?
I’m going to have to check my mother’s phone.
Those who lost money on Trump coin.
HAHAHAHAHA
With all material pain this man has inflicted, I totally forgot about his crypto scam.
What the fuck, he’s so cartoonishly evil.
It’s the latest family scam. Barron has a net worth of $150,000,000, mostly from his portion of his own crypto scam.
Morons with a red hat?
Don’t you go dragging Linux into this /s
A previous version of this article stated that the White House app was actively tracking users’ GPS coordinates every 4.5 minutes via OneSignal’s SDK. This characterisation, which circulated widely on X, including in posts that accumulated hundreds of thousands of views, has since been contested by independent technical analysis. Multiple developers who reviewed the decompiled code confirmed that while the GPS tracking constants exist within OneSignal’s bundled SDK, the app does not call that capability. No location permission prompt is issued to users upon installation, and OneSignal’s documentation states that location data is not collected unless a developer explicitly enables the feature. The GPS code is most likely residual from the SDK template rather than a deliberate implementation. This article has been updated to reflect that distinction.
This is at the bottom of the article.
Anybody, anybody at all, who believes that they aren’t going to be doing something really machiavellian, after operating on a “million deportations per year” paradigm, needs their head examined.
After dictatorship is activated, it’ll be required for citizens.
Wait & see…
( & if they forgot to put spyware into their app this time, that doesn’t mean it won’t come in in an update. )
Get cynical: evidence warrants it, nowadays…
_ /\ _
PS: I have NO idea why a partial-version of this comment got multi-posted, while I was still writing it.
Sorry.
( & if they forgot to put spyware into their app this time, that doesn’t mean it won’t come in in an update. )
Do you honestly believe the federal government needs people to install the official Whitehouse app in order to track their location?
If so, lol.
Competitive-narcissism:
I expect ALL such sociopaths/psychopaths ( incorporated-“persons” or individuals ) to be competing against each-other.
Why would they share??
There’s peer-reviewed research published that doctors demand their own CT-scan of a patient, even if an already-existing recent-scan is on file, even though that’s going to increase that-patient’s cancer-likelihood…
Narcissism’s real!
It alters behavior in predictable ways…
_ /\ _
deleted by creator
If you’re stupid enough to install that on your phone, you deserve whatever it is that you get. I’m surprised it doesn’t periodically send your browsing history to the fuhrer for inspection. Wouldn’t want those sheep getting the wrong thoughts.
I’m surprised it doesn’t periodically send your browsing history to the fuhrer for inspection.
That’s the ultimate objective, of course. That, and tracking every opinion you post on social media.
K, I think they all deserve high velocity therapy to fix their broken brains.
A little Flying Lead Poisoning?
But her emails!!!
Is this the same app that also jas a feature that allows you to inform on others to ICE?
