What Do You Get When You Mix 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale?

You get the Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You apps, which spy on parishioners for their churches, allegedly to keep them from doing "impure" things.

And people wonder why young people see churches and extreme and too concerned with personal sexual morality and are fleeing in droves:

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.”

Their disavowal of cult status appears to be false advertising.

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.

The omniscience of Covenant Eyes soon weighed heavily on Hao-Wei Lin, who has since left Gracepoint. Within a month of installing the app, he started receiving accusatory emails from his church leader referencing things he had viewed online. “Anything you need to tell me?” reads one email Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED. Attached was a report from Covenant Eyes that detailed every single piece of digital content Hao-Wei Lin had consumed the prior week. It was a trail of digital minutiae accumulated from nights spent aimlessly browsing the internet, things Hao-Wei Lin could barely remember having seen—and would have forgotten about had a member of his Church not confronted him. The church leader zeroed in on a single piece of content that Covenant Eyes had flagged as “Mature”: Hao-Wei Lin had searched “#Gay” on a website called Statigr.am, and the app had flagged it.

Gracepoint, which focuses on colleges, claims to “serve students” on more than 70 campuses across the United States. According to emails between a Covenant Eyes representative and a former Gracepoint church leader that WIRED reviewed, the company said that in 2012 as many as 450 Gracepoint Church members were signed up to be monitored through Covenant Eyes.

“I wouldn’t quite call it spyware,” says a former member of Gracepoint who was asked to use Covenant Eyes and spoke on the condition of anonymity, due to privacy concerns. “It’s more like ‘shameware,’ and it’s just another way the church controls you.”

………

Ed Kang, pastor of Gracepoint Church in Berkeley, California, and a major figure in the organization, says in an email that volunteer staff members are required to install Covenant Eyes or Accountable2You “as part of their staff agreement.” But he disputes that church leaders were instructed to monitor congregants’ phone activity. “Usually it’s whoever they [congregants] designate, and we actually discourage leaders from being the accountability partners as that seems a bit too heavy,” he writes. (All five former Gracepoint congregants who spoke to WIRED said a church leader was their accountability partner.) Kang adds that the number of Gracepoint congregants who use Covenant Eyes or Accountable2You “may be significantly higher than 450 nowadays” and that Accountable2You “has better pricing.”

This is beyond creepy, and (particularly among white Evangelical churches) it is all to common a behavior and a fixation of a certain type of cleric.

Maybe if they spent less time focusing on where people's genitals were, and more time focusing on how people can lead a just life and make the world a better place, they would not be hemorrhaging young members.