A White House app is appearing on federal employees' work phones without their consent — and won't stay deleted.
In May, the White House announced it would automatically push its new app to the work phones of millions of government employees. Workers at the Department of Agriculture, the State Department, and the Department of Labor told WIRED they were alarmed when the app appeared uninvited. At least one USDA employee tested deleting it and watched it reinstall immediately. The workers requested anonymity, citing fear of retaliation.
Force-installing software on employee devices and making it undeletable raises immediate questions about surveillance, data collection, and the boundary between an employer's IT policy and a political administration's communications reach. Federal work phones are government property, but mandatory, persistent apps from the White House are a different category of concern than, say, a required VPN client.
Mandatory apps that reinstall themselves are a standard mobile device management feature — the same mechanism corporations use to push email clients onto company phones. The difference here is who ordered it and why, and neither answer is yet on the record.