American evangelicals create app that warns family members if they watch pornography

The Christian surveillance app Covenant Eyes works simply: it tracks your movements and flags anything that is considered inappropriate, namely pornography. You then report these activities to an accountability partner—someone in your circle who, in turn, monitors your activities for you.

In accordance with El PaisMike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, not only expressed his enthusiastic approval of the statement, but also said last November that he and his son, then 17, used it to track each other’s pornography consumption. : “He and I received an account of all the things that […] our devices. If anything untoward appears, our accountability partner is notified immediately. I am proud to tell you that my son has a clean record,” Johnson said during a talk about the “war on technology” at Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana, published on X.

The Republican official says he first heard about Covenant Eyes at a conference of Promise Keepers, a Christian and evangelical men’s organization that historian Christine Kobes has called “a militant ideal of white Christian masculinity.”

According to Ana Sierra, a psychologist and clinical sexologist quoted in the newspaper, Johnson “doesn’t understand what sexuality is. He hates sex education because it is aimed not at education, but at control. Control contributes to greater anxiety about the situation in which one finds oneself.” . to be avoided, leading to a greater likelihood of addiction and sensation seeking, as well as greater rebellion against those who control us.”

Ron DeHaas, president of Covenant Eyes, is an evangelist who links sex trafficking to pornography consumption. He founded the company in 2000 to protect his two children, then teenagers, from what he considers an X-rated apocalypse. Covenant Eyes currently employs 200 people and has annual revenues of $26 million ($23 million) .

Josep Maria Gagne, a computer engineer specializing in artificial intelligence, notes that “this is all very puritanical.” “I doubt this app will work; I think it serves more as a publicity stunt. On the other hand, for it to be truly effective, the platform must have access to everything that is private to the user. should look at all my photos on my external drive to see if I’m looking at pornography or not, or can it detect by clicks whether I’m looking at landscapes or nudes?

For a clinical psychologist and sexologist, such measures would only be justified in a society addicted to pornography. “Cases of addiction are in the minority,” says Ana Sierra, adding that “this app implies that a person becomes perverted or sexually deviant simply by watching pornography, but that is not the case. It’s not that the app is bad, it’s that using what you’re given is just like anything else. and in the long term, if we watch violent pornography, it will disrupt our lives, our relationships, our sexuality and the sexuality of others.”

In January of this year, DeHaas’ company launched Victory, a spin-off app to optimize the service offered by Covenant Eyes. Its sensor does not respond to your device and uses artificial intelligence to detect “destructive” activity and block explicit websites. Covenant Eyes will be installed on all your devices to form a protection system, and Victory is where all the data is collected, spy-net style against pornography consumption.