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.
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™
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
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!
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.
Freedom as a tag line not as a promise.
Its all projection from the west 🤷♀️
Also Red Star OS
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.
That channel was Mrwhosetheboss
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
Is the app a requirement to get a press pass?
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.
I thought it was a given that, if it’s a phone app, you’re likely to want to carry it with you, not leave it on a desk with your computer.
That’s probably why they did it. They know trump is most likely to be shot at by one of their own nuts.
Thank god that they banned foreigner made Routers to their whole country for security reasons though.
Banning routers today, Reuters tomorrow.
That means we have to invade a foreign country who makes routers, because we don’t make routers in America.
America First!
deleted by creator
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
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.
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.
its gotta be hard to be a conspiracy theorist nowadays where every theory turns out to be true
I wish any of the conspiracy theorists theories are the real theories.
They are all into pizzagate and flat earth, and not “huh, I bet the government’s app is a peice of shit that’s tracking me”
hey i’m a bigfoot truther. his name is larry and he’s real into hugs
i mean that’s it. we don’t really have much beyond he sings like a moose that one time we let him use the shower. WHICH WAS A MISTAKE HE CLOGGED THE DAMN THING. but he sang like a moose.
Honestly, with this admin… I think pizzagate is one of those “every accusation is a confession” deals
Conspiracy theorists never actually believe in the actual conspiracies. No it’s always the lamp posts broadcasting nanobots into your blood. And not that the phone that has tracking capabilities is tracking you, in fact no conspiracy theorist ever has ever been worried about their iPhone or billionaires sending plenty text emails to each other about to listen activities.
The only conclusion I can reach from your post is that you know absolutely nothing about “conspiracy theorists”.
Thousands were banned from across the internet for questioning the official line about covid, meanwhile, it really was a lab leak. Just one example.
Different people have been wrong about conspiracies, others have been right about conspiracies; your “none have ever been worried about iPhone” claim is ludicrous. How do you come up with this? Why do you imagine random “factoids” with no basis in reality?
It’s kind of scary
No conspiracy theorists aren’t interested in seeking out actual conspiracies. They’re trying to make themselves feel important in a world that doesn’t care about them. So they find some special secret that only they know and that makes them feel important and claim the earth is flat.
As far as factoids are concerned where are you getting the evidence that COVID was a lab leak? That has never been confirmed.
Yeah, I thought the larger body of evidence all but proves that it was a wet market source.
It’s only paranoia when you’re wrong.
Is it paranoia though if they believe in a particular thing with no actual evidence and it just turns out that they’re partially correct by chance?
Because there are plenty of conspiracies along the lines of “the government is monitoring everyone” but it’s always been via nanobots in your blood or via psychic energies being emitted from 5G towers. It’s never “the government to tracking me with this GPS enabled device that I voluntarily purchased with my own money, now excuse me I have to make a rambling geotagged Facebook post the Gray Aliens”.
You are right. But my statement already includes these groups.
I don’t see this information as being particu relevant. There are various boards and committees where half the people are government and half of them are from Google. From what I gather, Google more or less functions as the mass surveillance arm of the government, so a Government App serving this purpose would be redundant.
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?
Sounds good to me. Size 9 works great for that kind of therapy.
So their app description is lying?
The Trump regime, lying?
This is a thing unheard of!
Must be the Democrat’s fault somehow!
Probably copy-pasted from some other app … which is also lying about data security.
Like how Truth Social is copy pasted from Mastodon.
Wtf is a White House app good for? Streamlining his mental diahrea into your hands?
Official propaganda delivered right to your push notifications:
Wow. That’s North Korea levels of propaganda.
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.
Why would anyone install government shit on their phone
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.
Ah, I see. I had it confused for Organic Maps. Thanks for clarifying
Don’t you follow and obey Orange Jesus?
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
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?
Both are verified by an automated system.
which is why fake reviews slip through but fake downloads don’t really (download count is easy to verify with device feedback, fake reviews require a proper system…)
One thing I don’t think has got enough attention is the fact that it does a fetch from Truth Social as well, which means Trump personally gets at least some indirect data on the app’s users on a server that isn’t even slightly controlled or contracted by the government.
Butter emails
The researcher’s page referenced by this article: https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app
Thank you!
Why would anyone download this?
If you’re so stupid that you install an app for Trump propaganda, you deserve to boot of the state on your neck.
