Some protesters were armed and chanted at State Police troopers outside the House chamber to “let us in.”Īt Operation Gridlock, the committee gathered the locations of roughly 506 cellphones, but the locations collected April 30 from the 422 individuals at the American Patriots Rally was a more useful data set since protesters were in close quarters inside the Capitol instead of segregated in their vehicles, Davison said. ![]() Bill Huizenga, R-Zeeland, in the 2018 election, said his group hired VoteMap to monitor location data for both the April 15 Operation Gridlock and the April 30 American Patriot Rally.īetween 800 and 1,000 individuals attended the American Patriot Rally, according to Michigan State Police, with dozens entering the state Capitol during House and Senate session. We sort that data that’s already there and then query it to answer questions.”ĭavidson, a Democrat who lost to U.S. "Data is always being transmitted," McEwan said. While VoteMap is used primarily for Democratic-leaning campaigns, Datum also offers Moblyze for Republican campaigns and YouTarget for commercial endeavors, McEwan said. ![]() ![]() People gauging cellphone locations the day of the April 30 protest and the day after would not be able to see to whom the phone belonged, she said. The cellphone users remained anonymous and their locations were instead culled from the publishers of the opt-in apps they were using, said McEwan, CEO of the Austin-based startup Datum that is the parent company under which VoteMap falls. The protesters agreed to be tracked because the information was collected from "opt-in" cellphones, in which the user at some point agreed to terms allowing for such data to be collected by firms such as VoteMap, said VoteMap CEO Jennifer McEwan. "That sounds like an invasion of privacy," Kelley said. Ryan Kelley, a west Michigan resident who helped organize the American Patriot Rally, said he was uncomfortable with the cellphone location data being gathered there. "They’re going to track us at the Capitol but nowhere else?" "That doesn’t make sense," Robinson said. He also wondered why the Committee to Protect Medicare, which is supposed to be concerned about health care, would fail to track demonstrators at the police brutality protests in Grand Rapids, Lansing and Detroit. I wouldn’t have gone live on Facebook," said Robinson, founder of the Michigan Liberty Militia who attended both protests. "I’d have still showed up, but I would have left my phone at home. The committee at least could have alerted attendees they were being tracked, he said. The tracking has raised the hackles of Capitol demonstrators, such as Phil Robinson, a Barry County resident who said he considers the data gathering during the April 15 and April 30 protests a violation of his rights. ![]() The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services’ contact tracing initiative has come across no reports where a COVID-19-positive individual reported attendance at an event, including protests, in their travel history, said Lynn Sutfin, a department spokeswoman. That data contains geolocation information that can be queried to show movement on a map. The tracking, known as "geoharvesting," is when data is gathered from a smartphone app on a device connected to the Internet.
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