What are your pronouns? Your sex? Your race and sexual orientation? Are you physically or mentally disabled? The Philadelphia Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity wants to know these to “better serve the residents of Philadelphia.”
These “optional demographic questions” are attached to the form you must fill out if you want to take the city’s Civic Engagement Academy Learning Series class titled, “Leading a Community Meeting.” It promises to teach how to “host a successful meeting and manage conflict.” The bottom of the form indicates that it is “powered by NGP VAN.”
Get Out the Democrat Vote
NGP-VAN is “the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive political campaigns and organizations, nonprofits, municipalities, and other groups,” according to its website. Philadelphia has been collecting invasively personal information about its citizens for years through NGP-VAN, an arrangement which Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation, previously told The Federalist raises “all kinds of potential legal issues.”
This same company is now instructing political foot soldiers which citizens to approach about voting, using its Democrat-only MiniVAN application.
MiniVAN is used across the country by Democrat door knockers. These volunteers download MiniVan to their phones and download a list of people to visit. MiniVAN creates a map of addresses and shows canvassers how many voters are in the home. The app has a script to read and, importantly, a place to upload notes that will be added to the Democrat knowledge base, such as whether the voter has been canvassed or has voted.
The app is getting massive use in Philadelphia right now. NGP VAN recently reported on social media that the MiniVAN app was used more in Philadelphia earlier this month than in other major cities across the nation.
Which city will have the most MiniVAN volunteers this weekend? 👀
Organizers — keep adding and confirming those shifts!
https://t.co/dqSinCwxsr— NGP VAN (@NGPVAN) August 22, 2024
Everybody wants a piece of Pennsylvania, the purple battleground state with 19 coveted electoral votes. To win the Commonwealth, candidates need a strong showing in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs.
Imagine how useful it would be to have detailed information about voters, such as age, sex, and language. These markers can predict which candidate a voter may support. If you are making a list of people to target for voter registration, mail-in voting, and ballot harvesting, this is the kind of data that can win elections.
Republican operatives in Pennsylvania who spoke on background say they use a different app for door-knocking, but they believe Democrats have better data.
MiniVAN is being used in other battleground cities as well. The top 10 cities with the highest use of the app earlier this month were Philadelphia, Chicago, Phoenix, Raleigh, Atlanta, New York City, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Boston, and Detroit, according to the report on X. The use of this app is a strong indicator of where Democrats are focusing their ground game.
NGP-VAN did not respond to a voicemail requesting an interview for this story.
Privacy Notice Connects These Data Streams In One Company
Philadelphia citizens who interact with the city’s websites soon run into ways to cough up their private information to NGP-VAN.
For example, to volunteer with the Office of Children and Families, you have the option to disclose your occupation and employment status. Want to receive emails from the City of Philadelphia Board of Ethics? Fill out a form with your postal code and email. Taking a class on working with volunteers remotely? That’s another form inviting users to fill out “optional demographic questions,” all connected to NGP-VAN.
And if filling out forms gets old, you can sign up for FastAction, a service powered in part by NGP-VAN that holds your information to populate forms automatically.
On some Philadelphia forms, users must uncheck a box to opt out of signing up for FastAction, a program NGP-VAN describes as a “safe and secure way for you to save your contact and payment information, allowing you to easily show your support in the future with a single click.”
The goal of FastAction, which invites users to “show [their] support with a single click,” is not simply to ease the user experience for the next time you fill out a form.
“FastAction and ActionID are powered by NGP VAN, Inc and EveryAction. We’re a leading technology provider to campaigns and organizations, offering clients an integrated platform of the best fundraising, compliance, field, organizing, digital, and social networking products,” the FastAction website says. “Our goal is to create a network of supporters that will help our clients win!”
Keep clicking and you will find the FastAction privacy policy. It connects a lot of company names, chiefly Bonterra, the parent of them all.
“Bonterra LLC … is an online, cloud-based service platform that provides individuals and organizations the ability to contribute to, organize, and manage their causes,” the privacy policy explains. “Bonterra Services include EveryAction, Mobilize, NGP VAN, CyberGrants, Network for Good, Social Solutions and the respective individualized service offerings thereunder.”
Most who sign up for FastAction through NGP-VAN will likely never read the 5,000-word privacy notice. Nor are they likely to make the connection that, after they agree to the policy, NGP- VAN’s MiniVAN app might have access to their private data they provided city government.
The privacy policy tells users that the platform’s “Services,” which includes NGP-VAN, collect contact information, age, sex, “political and professional affiliations,” “interests in charitable causes,” occupation, the type of event you signed up for, the organizations affiliated with the event, whether you made a donation, and more.
The company may combine your information with information it collects through third parties such as public databases, according to the privacy policy, to build a file on you with even more information than you realized you gave them. It may even pick up information from your social networking sites or ask to view or download your Google Sheets or Google Drive.
“This allows us to configure your integration(s) in accordance with your preferences. We do not use this information for any other purpose,” the privacy disclaimer reads. You agree to this when you sign up for FastAction.
The company uses the information in numerous ways, including to “facilitate your engagement” with the company and its organizations, and to “[r]ecommend opportunities to engage with other organizations and campaigns that use [their] Services,” according to the privacy policy.
The data collection is widespread, going well beyond Philadelphia. The FastAction service can collect user data through many well-known Democrat political campaigns. It reaches across the country, collecting data through issues-based websites promoting partisan environmental concerns, advocating for abortion, and seeking fracking bans.
This quiet but immense network of data collection can be harnessed to win elections for Democrats. Republicans do not appear to possess a similar level of sophistication.
