Gracepoint, a Southern Baptist church, relied on a little more than God to keep an eye on its members. If the church is forced to clarify that it is not a cult.
Covenant Eyes is an anti-pornography app that new members of Gracepoint are asked to install. Covenant Eyes spies on members' web traffic, takes a screen shot of their phones every single minute, and then sends this information to an accountability partner, according to a must-read investigation by Wired. It is more like a piece of software.
The member who left the congregation told the magazine that they received accusatory emails from Gracepoint which contained eerily detailed reports of his digital activity, ranging from everything to his mundane browsing habits to even flagged a search of the #Gay.
shameware is an app used by religious groups and parents to shame people into dropping porn habits and other immoral activities.
Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You are doing more than just monitoring users' porn habits, according to a new report. They're abusing accessibility permission, which is special permission for features that are meant to help out persons with disabilities, to surveil virtually everything a user does with them. Collecting every visited website and logging which apps are opened are some of the things captured in the Screenshot.
Gracepoint isn't the only church that uses shady tech, as several other churches force their members to install various types of shameware apps.
Both Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You were taken down from the play store by the company after they were found to be in violation of its policies. They are still available on the App Store.
Nicole Praus, a pornography researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she has never seen anyone who has been on one of these apps feel better about themselves. The reality is that there isn't something wrong with these people.
Grindr was fined a huge amount for espionage on users.
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