Gracepoint Church volunteer staff members are required to install Covenant Eyes or Accountable2You “as part of their staff agreement.”
Covenant Eyes spokesperson Dan Armstrong told The Christian Post that the company shares “many of the concerns raised” in the WIRED article and that “spying on people is damaging and counterproductive.”
“Our usage policy explicitly prohibits using Covenant Eyes to monitor someone without their authorization,” said Armstrong. “We do not allow spouses to use Covenant Eyes to spy on one another or employers to secretly monitor employees.”
Armstrong further expressed that Covenant Eyes has turned away parole officers seeking to “secretly monitor employees.” The intent of the platform is that it would be used in accordance with the users’ consent, which must be given without coercion or amid a power imbalance.
“This creates safer relationships where shame has less of a grip and real growth can take place,” Armstrong said. When a user’s accountability partner is a church leader or authority figure, “shame tends to increase and a person who might want to overcome a problem is instead pushed to hide it further.”
Gracepoint also responded to the WIRED article with a statement.
“We share the widely-held concerns about privacy violations related to technology use. However, applications like Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You are categorically different in that users voluntarily choose who sees their internet activity,” the statement read. “At our church, only those that volunteer to serve as staff members are expected to have some sort of accountability software or arrangement.”
“Our current practice is to discourage staff from choosing their leaders as their accountability partners as we prefer that to be close friends or others they feel comfortable with,” Gracepoint stated.
Nevertheless, WIRED said that all five of the former Gracepoint members they spoke to told them a church leader had been their accountability partner.
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After WIRED contacted Google about Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You misusing their accessibility API to monitor all of a device’s activity, both apps were removed from the Google Play store. Both apps remain available on iOS.
