Brit, a former user of Accountable2You, asked to only be identified by her first name due to privacy concerns. Making you conform to what your pastor wants is the goal. Brit says she was asked to install the app by her parents after she was caught looking at pornography. She says she had to sit down and have a conversation with her pastor after she read an article about a religion. I have the right to read what I want to read, even though I was a child.
Some accountability apps advertise their services to churches. Accountable2You advertises group rates for churches and sets up landing pages for specific churches where members can sign up. The church and ministry outreach director is employed by Covenant Eyes.
Accountable2 You didn't reply to WIRED's requests for comment.
Eva Galperin is the director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Any app installed in a church setting is done in a coercive way. While WIRED did not speak to anyone who was unaware that the app was on their phone, Hao-Wei Lin said he didn't feel like he was in a position where he could say no to his church leader. A $400-a-month apartment was secured by Gracepoint for him. He might have been homeless without the support of the church.
Everyone we spoke to had different experiences. James Nagy was a one-time leader of the Gracepoint church and was also on the other side of the church. Nagy was taught as a child that homosexuality was a sin. He jumped at the chance to use Gracepoint's software solution that claimed to be able to help a moral dilemma. He said that the pressure to install the app came from himself, not from anyone else. Nagy doesn't think Gracepoint tried to change him. I tried to make myself better. Nagy is now an elder at the Presbyterian Church (USA) and used to be a consultant for the Reformation Project, a nonprofit that works to advance LGBTQ inclusion in the church.
In the quest to curb behavior churches deem immoral, accountability apps will collect and store extremely sensitive personal information from their users, including from those under the age of 18 Fortify asks its users to log information about when they masturbated, where they were, and what device they used. Fortify does allow it to share data with trusted third parties to perform statistical analysis, though it does not mention who these trusted third parties are. In a phone call, the CEO of Fortify's parent company Impact Suite explained that Mixpanel is one of the trusted third parties.
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