It puts a lot of features at the fingertips of the faithful, including the ability to filter whole neighborhoods by religion, ethnicity, “Hispanic country of origin,” “assimilation,” and whether there are children living in the household.
Its core function is to produce neighborhood maps and detailed tables of data about people from non-Anglo-European backgrounds, drawn from commercial sources typically used by marketing and data-harvesting firms.
training videos produced by users show the extent to which evangelical groups are using sophisticated ways to target non-Christian communities, with questionable safeguards around security and privacy.
In one instance, he points to the sharable note-taking function and suggests leaving information for each household, such as “Daughter left for college” and “Mother is in the hospital.”
increasingly popular among Christian supremacist groups, prayerwalking calls on believers to wage “violent prayer” (persistently and aggressively channeling emotions of hatred and anger against Satan), engage in “spiritual mapping” (identifying areas where evil is at work, such as the darkness ruling over an abortion clinic, or the “spirit of greed” ruling over Las Vegas), and conduct prayerwalking (roaming the streets in groups, “praying on-site with insight”).
newly arrived refugees might well find a knock on the door from strangers with knowledge of their personal circumstances distressing—and that’s before these surprise visitors even begin to attempt to convert them.
placing people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds on easy-to-access databases is a dangerous road to go down
Time to ruin their database with false entries and commas.
I downloaded the app and got to where I could see mapping data to do exactly this. They aren’t asking users to populate basic data, but they will let you add your own notes.
I think a lot of the features the story talks about are exclusive to church admins, but admittedly, I didn’t spend too long in the app.
How are they even getting the input data for this? Like all the private info plus connected to address
It’s all publicly available. The same data I saw is available via my county tax appraisal’s website.
Name/address, sure, but ethnicity & religion too?
But, side note, when we discovered our county’s map-navigated database… we lurk all the time. “who owns this house?” It’s also a great way to see who owns empty lots, of which we bought one earlier this year.
Name might be how they determine ethnicity. A ‘Hernandez’ is probably Latino/a, a ‘Kowalski’ is probably Polish, and a ‘Li’ is probably Chinese. Of course, no clue as to how long their family has been in the US, but it’s enough to fill in the field.