We intercepted the White House app's network traffic
by donutpepperoni on 4/1/2026, 1:58:45 AM
https://www.atomic.computer/blog/white-house-app-network-traffic-analysis/
Comments
by: john_strinlai
43% (of the 158 3rd-party requests) is... google. youtube, fonts, and analytics. 55% if you include facebook and twitter.<p>a government app shouldnt have crazy analytics and tracking and whatever. but i dont think loading google fonts or embedding youtube videos is really all that wild in the grand scheme of things.<p>given the title, i was half expecting some sort of egregious list with, like, palantir and some ICE domains or something. i dont like the app, but google? facebook? that is pretty boring.<p>the title probably should focus on nature/severity of the requests. titling it with a % of all requests feels bait-y if google/facebook/twitter isnt off in its own category. they have all sorts of dumb little requests to all sorts of domains that really inflate the numbers.<p>(as a note, atomic.computer also loads analytics and google fonts. which is whatever. but if they are going to imply 3rd-party requests are <i>inherently</i> bad just by nature of being 3rd-party, they may want to clean their own house a little bit.)<p>edit: original title at the time of my comment was <i>"We intercepted the White House app's traffic. 77% of requests go to 3rd parties"</i>
4/1/2026, 4:00:47 AM
by: merek
> We installed mitmproxy on a Mac, configured an iPhone to route traffic through it, and installed the mitmproxy CA certificate on the device.<p>> All HTTPS traffic was decrypted and logged. No modifications were made to the traffic. The app was used as any normal user would use it.<p>Is it really that simple to inspect network traffic on an iPhone, namely to get it to trust the user-installed cert? I do quite a bit of network inspection on Android and I find it to be painful, even if the apps don't use certificate pinning.<p>Regardless, it highlights the importance of having control of our own devices, including the ability to easily inspect network traffic. We have the right to know where our data is being sent, and what data is being sent.<p>I recall during COVID it was discovered that Zoom was sending traffic to China. There was also the recent case of Facebook tracking private mobile browsing activity and sending it to their servers via the FB app. Imagine how much questionable traffic goes unnoticed due to the difficulty in configuring network inspection for apps.
4/1/2026, 3:44:06 AM
by: Cider9986
Some previous discussion. I think this one is worth a read as well, though.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555556">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555556</a> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577761">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577761</a>
4/1/2026, 2:40:05 AM
by: drnick1
I filter the vast majority of adware such as doubleclick.net right at the DNS level. Not that I would use the app anyway...<p>It's shocking how many third party connections an average website opens. It's particularly true for news websites. Interestingly, atomic.computer also attempts to load Cloudflareinsights and some Google fonts, both of which are denied on my network. This is precisely the kind of requests that make it trivially possible for Google to follow people around the Internet, and the vast majority of webmasters are complicit of this.
4/1/2026, 3:57:30 AM
by: pratyushsood
Government apps should absolutely be held to a higher standard than consumer B2C apps. Loading Google Fonts is one thing — sending telemetry to OneSignal and Facebook from an official government app is a different conversation entirely.<p>In Australia, apps handling government data must comply with the PSPF (Protective Security Policy Framework) and the ISM, which explicitly restrict data flows to untrusted third parties. A government app routing 77% of requests externally would fail an IRAP assessment on day one.<p>The fix is straightforward: self-host fonts, use first-party analytics, and treat every external request as a data exfiltration vector. Government digital teams know how to do this — the question is whether anyone is actually reviewing the network behavior post-deployment
4/1/2026, 4:11:20 AM
by: _heimdall
Don't get me wrong, the government requires a high level of scrutiny.<p>I would be interested to see how this compares to industry standard though, 77% doesn't seem outrageous to me given all the trackers and advertising code I've seen over the years. It wouldn't surprise me if this is inline with many apps people install and don't think twice about.
4/1/2026, 4:02:21 AM
by: ddxv
Browse the SDKs it's using as well:<p><a href="https://appgoblin.info/apps/gov.whitehouse.app/sdks" rel="nofollow">https://appgoblin.info/apps/gov.whitehouse.app/sdks</a>
4/1/2026, 3:01:15 AM
by: gruez
So like... most b2c apps out there? I checked app privacy report for a few such apps I have installed and also got a very high proportion of third party domains. Maybe not as high as 77% but definitely above 50% (ie. more domains are third party than first party). The most surprising part here is them refusing to put correct info in the "data collected" section of the app store listing.<p>edit: they seemed to have updated the store listing, so the "data collected" section is correct.
4/1/2026, 2:31:57 AM
by: vjvjvjvjghv
Ads are coming next.
4/1/2026, 3:39:38 AM
by: gnerd00
is location tracking part of OneSignal ? no mention of the other location services in this writeup ?
4/1/2026, 3:57:29 AM
by: longislandguido
[flagged]
4/1/2026, 3:00:08 AM