Catholics in Iowa went to church. Steve Bannon tracked their phones.

Campaigns have been using cell-phone location data for years. Did Bannon take it too far?

Steve Bannon and the conservative group CatholicVote used cell-phone location data for people who had been inside Roman Catholic churches in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2018 to target them with get-out-the-vote ads, ThinkProgress has learned.

Bannon, a former senior White House aide, made the claim in a deleted scene from the new documentary about him, The Brink. This scene has not been previously published.

“If your phone’s ever been in a Catholic church, it’s amazing, they got this data,” Bannon told director Alison Klayman as they sat in his Washington, D.C., home on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections.