Earlier this week, Daniel Kreps reported in Rolling Stone that House Speaker Mike Johnson “admitted that he and his son monitored each other’s porn intake” by using “‘accountability software’ called Covenant Eyes.” Just how much “intake” there is in the Johnson household is not clear.
According to Kreps, “During a conversation on the “War on Technology” at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church —unearthed by X user Receipt Maven last week — [Johnson] … talked about how he installed … Covenant Eyes on his devices in order to abstain from internet porn and other unsavory websites.”
“It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate,” Johnson said.
Covenant Eyes, founded in 2000, is a major player in the accountability ecosphere. It is named for a verse in the Book of Job: “I have made a covenant with mine eyes. Why then should I think upon a maid?”
For decades, evangelical church leaders have maintained that their members have problems with pornography. There is no doubt that in the age of the Internet and social media, pornography is more prevalent than ever.
For quite some time, conservative Christians battling pornography has been an arrow in the quiver of culture war issues, alongside such issues as abortion, same-sex marriage, prayer in the schools. There have been many attempts at dealing with evangelicals’ porn problem: one-on-one counseling, conferences, men’s groups, on-line teach-ins, books, videos and power point presentations.
A 2019 New Yorker piece by Isaac Choiner, titled “A Sociologist of Religion on Protestants, Porn, and the ‘Purity Industrial Complex’,” discussed “Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants,” a book by Samuel L. Perry that drew from “interviews and survey data to show how the availability of Internet porn is affecting traditional, religious Christians. Focusing on America’s Protestant majority, and specifically its pious members, Perry [found] that pornography is leading to depression and unhappiness, and it’s disrupting marriages and communities.”
In an interview, Perry told Chotiner that, “with conservative Protestants, you have this fascinating paradox of a group of people who hate pornography morally. They want to eradicate it from the world. And yet, statistically, they will view it slightly less often than your average American. And so you have this paradoxical situation of a group of people who collectively hate it, and yet, as individuals, they semi-regularly watch it” (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/q-and-a/a-sociologist-of-religion-on-protestants-porn-and-the-purity-industrial-complex).
Covenant Eyes, a phone app is offering a solution, one that apparently House Speaker Johnson is using. At its website (https://www.covenanteyes.com/), Covenant Eyes declares: “Struggling to quit watching porn? YOU'RE NOT ALONE -- Join over 1.5 million people who've used Covenant Eyes to experience victory over porn.” Visitors can select from: “I’m a man who wants to quite porn,” “I’m a woman who wants to quit porn,” “I want to help a friend live porn-free,” “I want to help my spouse live porn-free,” or “I want to help my child live porn-free.”
According to WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra, an investigative data journalist, “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 Accountability2You—violate its policies.”
Mehrotra reported (https://www.wired.com/story/covenant-eyes-anti-porn-accountability-monitoring-apps/) that, “The current iteration of the Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former NSA mathematician who [became] a data scientist for the company.”
Covenant Eyes “is allegedly capable of distinguishing between pornographic and non-pornographic images. … captur[ing] everything visible on a device’s screen, analyzing the images locally before slightly blurring them and sending them to a server to be saved. ‘Image-based pornography detection was a huge conceptual change for Covenant Eyes,’ [Michael] Holm told The Christian Post, an evangelical Christian news outlet, in 2019. ‘While I didn’t yet know it, God had put me in that place at that time for a purpose higher than myself, just as I and others had desired and prayed for.’”
It addition to its app, the company organizes conferences “that are attended by thousands of people and dedicated to educating attendees about the dangers of pornography while pitching the company’s product as an urgent solution to what it characterizes as a growing moral crisis,” Mehrotra noted. According to the app analytics firm AppFigures, tens of thousands of people have downloaded Covenant Eyes. Rocketreach estimated that the company has a annual revenue is well over $20 million.
Covenant Eyes is not the only app tracking behavior that parents and/or religious leaders “deem unhealthy or immoral,” writes Mehrotra. In his story titled “The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps,” Mehrotra reported that “Fortify, for instance, was developed by the founder of an anti-pornography nonprofit called Fight the New Drug and tracks how often an individual masturbates in order to help them overcome ‘sexual compulsivity.’ The app has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has thousands of reviews on the Google Play store.”
Writing for Religion News Service, Jacob Lupfer reported that “In response to Mehrotra’s reporting, Google removed Accountable2You and Covenant Eyes from its Play store for ‘exploiting Android’s accessibility permissions to monitor almost everything someone does on their phone.’”