Gracepoint is the  kind of evangelical Southern Baptist church that’s compelled to publicly enumerate all of the ways it’s not a cult. “We’ll

The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps

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2022-09-22 18:00:45

Gracepoint is the kind of evangelical Southern Baptist church that’s compelled to publicly enumerate all of the ways it’s not a cult. “We’ll admit that we’re a bit crazy about the Great Commission and sharing the Gospel,” reads an FAQ page titled, “Is Gracepoint a Cult?” So when Grant Hao-Wei Lin came out to a Gracepoint church leader during their weekly one-on-one session, he was surprised to learn that he wasn’t going to be kicked out. According to his church leader, Hao-Wei Lin says, God still loved him in spite of his “struggle with same-sex attraction.”

But Gracepoint did not leave the matter in God’s hands alone. At their next one-on-one the following week, Hao-Wei Lin says the church leader asked him to install an app called Covenant Eyes on his phone. The app is explicitly marketed as anti-pornography software, but according to Hao-Wei Lin, his church leader told him it would help “control all of his urges.”

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You—violate its policies.

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