A voter analytics firm harvested data from millions of Americans’ cellphones during the 2020 covid-19 lockdowns and used the data to assign phone users a “covid-19 decree violation” score and a “covid-19 concern” score, according to a whitepaper released by PredictWise, the firm that harvested the data.
The data, derived from “nearly 2 billion GPS pings” stemming from “ground truth, real-time, ultra-granular location patterns,” according to PredictWise, was then used to target election-related messages to voters during the 2020 election season. According to PredictWise, the firm “understood that there were potential pockets of voters to target with covid-19 messaging and turned high-dimensional data covering over 100 million Americans into measures of adherence to covid-19 restrictions during deep lockdown.”
The data was collected with political purposes in mind, PredictWise said: “It doesn’t take a data scientist to know that covid-19 was going to play a major role in the 2020 election. “This once in a lifetime pandemic took control of the political debate, our airways, and ultimately our lives.”