President Donald Trump has been promoting the White House’s new mobile app — pushing it to become the third-most downloaded item on Apple’s popular App Store. But the app reportedly has numerous cybersecurity vulnerabilities, does not properly disclose the data it shares, and uses software in part from a Russia-founded company.

“Cybersecurity researchers warn that the White House’s new app regularly shares users’ IP addresses, time zones and other data to third-party services,” NOTUS reports. “But most of its users wouldn’t know that, because the app doesn’t disclose its data sharing the way most others do.”

Several cybersecurity experts were shocked by the app’s “slipshod” approach to cybersecurity, especially as it is essentially a product of the White House, and especially since the U.S. is at war.

“The U.S. government’s infrastructure is being attacked from all sides right now, and having an amateur WordPress developer running the White House’s public presence puts everybody who visits it at risk,” Philip Fields, a cybersecurity researcher and former FBI intelligence analyst, told NOTUS. He explains that if this were just a small business’ “random app,” it would not be a story.

“But it’s not,” Fields added. “This is the White House.”

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The app reportedly has left users and some White House staffers vulnerable.

One researcher showed NOTUS screenshots revealing that a Russia-founded software kit company that “provides premade widgets for the app makes public the personal information of some White House staffers through the app.” NOTUS chose to not disclose the staffers’ personal information.

Cybersecurity experts also told NOTUS that the data collected by the White House is not being properly disclosed.

“The White House, as of its latest version released on Friday, left that privacy manifest completely blank, suggesting it collects no data from users,” NOTUS reported.

“It seems to be sharing quite a lot of data about the users to these third parties,” a researcher told NOTUS. “The problem is that the privacy manifest says they do not share that information, but in fact they do. … That is a problem for end-user privacy because effectively, they’re misleading users about how their data is shared.”

A White House press release promoted the launch of its “powerful new official mobile app — delivering President Donald J. Trump and his Administration directly to the American people like never before.”

In his promotional video, President Trump says, “Every American should expect their government to have transparency, and the Trump administration is the most transparent in history. That is for sure.”

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President Donald Trump already placed three conservative justices on the Supreme Court during his first term. A liberal group is warning he could replace two of the other three conservatives with his own loyalists — and they’re not waiting for it to happen.

While none of the nine justices have announced plans to retire, two conservatives — Justice Clarence Thomas (77) and Justice Samuel Alito (76) — could conceivably retire before Trump leaves office.

Demand Justice says they aren’t waiting, they’re preparing.

“The preparations come at a moment when Democrats are feeling optimistic about their ability to break Republican control of Congress, and when there is growing fear in some corners of the party that Mr. Trump will seek to install loyalist justices who could sit on the court for decades,” The New York Times reports.

Josh Orton, the president of Demand Justice, told the Times: “If you think that Trump is willing to leave two of the three justices he thinks are most loyal on the court in their 80s past when he leaves office, you are not paying attention.”

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He says there is “no way” Trump, Thomas, and Alito “would ever commit the fundamental miscalculation about power that we saw from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama and we as a movement.”

Justice Ginsburg, who was 87, passed away during Trump’s first term, after a battle with cancer. Some on the left expressed frustration that she did not retire when Obama was president. Trump replaced her with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, moving the court to a strong 6-3 conservative majority.

“If Trump is handed another Supreme Court vacancy, we must be cleareyed and ready to make it an uphill battle,” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible that is partnering in the Demand Justice effort, told the Times. “This will be a defining political battle, and we intend to make sure the stakes are clear to everyone.”

Orton says Trump will want to install a loyalist to replace any retiring justice.

“He’s going to want someone he knows, someone who has given him advice that he trusts. Someone that knows him personally and he feels understands him and that he can call for years to come personally to his aid.”

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The March jobs report shows a nation where unemployment dropped slightly, to 4.3%, but some economists are cautioning the overall news may not be cause for celebration.

March was the best month for job gains since December 2024, according to Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal.

But the “full brunt” of the war is not reflected in the March report, NBC News reported, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ surveys were completed by March 12 — just 13 days into the war.

“Experts say the Iran war has already shifted the economic landscape in the weeks since the surveys for this report were conducted,” NBC adds.

“Broadly,” NBC notes, “the jobs market remains at a standstill — what many experts are calling a ‘no-hire, no fire’ environment, in which both layoffs and new placements are subdued.”

Indeed, just before the jobs report dropped on Friday, The New York Times’ Ben Casselman wrote that job growth “has slowed nearly to zero. But unemployment remains low because the labor force isn’t growing either. So the labor market is ‘balanced,’ but workers feel stuck.”

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He called it a “no-growth labor market.”

Heather Long points to “the somewhat troubling news,” noting that while the unemployment rate fell, it was “not for great reasons. There’s a big drop (almost -400k) in the labor force. The labor force participation rate also fell. It appears people stopped looking for work in March or perhaps more migrants left the workforce (or both).”

She also notes that wage growth has slowed, to 3.5 percent. As inflation rises — it is expected to go above 4 percent — workers’ paychecks will not be keeping pace with inflation.

The New York Times reports that the March jobs numbers “were collected before the energy price shock caused by the war in the Middle East tightened its grip on the global economy.”

“Forecasters have estimated that persistently higher oil prices will slow job creation and raise unemployment in a year they had expected the economy to regain some vigor,” the Times notes.

Harvard professor of economics Jason Furman adds that the three-month job creation average is 68,000. During the last year of the Biden presidency, the average monthly job creation was 186,000.

Mike Konczal, Senior Director of Policy and Research for the Economic Security Project, noticed some “darker clouds.”

“The length of time people are spending in unemployment has gotten longer in the past year, and still continues to increase,” Konczal writes. “This is no doubt adding to people’s discontent even with low overall rate.”

He also warns that it’s “not clear” the current conditions survive “the global shock of war.”

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Image via Reuters