How this company tracked 16,000 Iowa caucus-goers via their phones
On Thursday morning, I listened to an interview with the CEO of “a big data intelligence company” called Dstillery; it “demystifies consumers’ online footprints” to target them with ads. The CEO told public radio program Marketplace something astounding: his company had sucked up the mobile device ID’s from the phones of Iowa caucus-goers to match them with their online profiles.
Via Marketplace:
“We watched each of the caucus locations for each party and we collected mobile device ID’s,” Dstillery CEO Tom Phillips said. “It’s a combination of data from the phone and data from other digital devices.”
Dstillery found some interesting things about voters. For one, people who loved to grill or work on their lawns overwhelmingly voted for Trump in Iowa, according to Phillips.
When I heard this, I wondered how the company was doing this. Did they have employees at all the caucus locations holding phone-sniffing devices? The idea that phone-toting people could walk up to vote and immediately have their real world identities matched with a profile based on their digital trail would indeed be, as Marketplace headlined its piece, a “new frontier in voter tracking.”
http://fusion.net/story/268108/dstillery-clever-tracking-trick/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Seems way over dark side line to me. 
