📱Sterling Data Built a 30 Million Donor Database Using Other Brokers' Data

Your political texts may be tracked through one shared platform

Sterling Data Company assembled a database of roughly 30 million political donors in 2022, and it's now showing up in your text messages. Nearly half of the 725 political texts received this year contain tracking codes that appear to reference Sterling, and those codes come from dozens of PACs and campaigns, including the DCCC, DSCC, and James Talarico's campaign. If you've ever donated to a Democratic group, or even just clicked one link, you're probably in this database. Sterling combines age, location, politics, and donation history into voter profiles, and it pulls much of that from other data brokers. The company also handles the texting itself, which means it can rent the same record to multiple campaigns at once. The money trail is big. FEC records show a Biden joint fundraising committee paid Sterling about $1.87 million for donor lists over four months. The DSCC's first reported payment came November 22, 2023, and it kept paying, including roughly $250,000 this summer. Sterling says it limits how often people get contacted but hasn't said what those limits are. The real story: at least two people have won settlements over misdirected campaign texts.