App that warns your loved ones if you watch porn is a hit with the Christian right in the US

The way the online Christian monitoring app, Covenant Eyes, works is simple: it tracks your movements and flags up anything deemed unsuitable, particularly porn. It then sends a report of this activity to an accountability partner — someone in your circle who, in turn, has their activity monitored by you.

Mike Johnson, Republican speaker in the U.S. House of Representatives, has not only expressed his enthusiastic approval of the app, he declared in November last year that he and his then 17-year-old son Jack had been using it to track each other’s porn consumption: “So he and I get a report of all the things that are on […] our devices once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell you my son has got a clean slate,” Johnson revealed during a conversation on the War on Technology at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church, posted on X. He claims he first heard about Covenant Eyes at a conference of Promise Keepers, a Christian, evangelical organization for men, which historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has described as “the militant ideal of white Christian manhood.”

According to Ana Sierra, a psychologist and clinical sexologist, Johnson “doesn’t understand what sexuality is all about. He abhors sex education because he’s not about educating, he’s about control. And what control promotes at the end of the day is greater anxiety about the situation that is being avoided, leading to a greater chance of addiction and a search for thrills and more rebellion against those who are controlling us.”

Ron DeHaas, president of Covenant Eyes, is an evangelist who links sex trafficking to porn consumption. He founded the company in 2000 in order to protect his two then-teenage sons from what he believes is an X-rated apocalypse. Today, Covenant Eyes employs 200 people and has annual profits of $26 million. As Josep Maria Ganyet, a computer engineer specializing in AI, points out: “It’s all very puritanical. DeHaas is called the Christian CEO — nothing wrong so far, but first off, I doubt that this app will work; I think it serves more as an advertising gimmick. On the other hand, for this to be truly effective, the platform must have access to absolutely everything private to you. To be effective, does it have to see all my photos on my external drive to know if I’m looking at porn or not? Or does it detect with mouse clicks if I’m looking at landscapes or naked bodies? It seems like a total invasion of privacy.”

Such measures could only be justified in a society addicted to porn, but does such an addiction exist? “Cases of addiction are in the minority,” says Ana Sierra. “This app implies that you are perverse or sexually perverted simply for watching porn, and that’s not so. It’s not that the app is bad, rather it’s the use that is given to it, like everything else. One positive that we can get out of something like this is that we become aware of what we are being fed in the sexual sphere and the damage it can do to us in the short and long term. If you watch violent porn, it’s going to violate your life, your relationships, your sexuality and the sexuality of others. That’s a problem.”

In January this year, DeHaas’ company launched Victory, a sister app to optimize the service offered by Covenant Eyes. Its sensor remains silent on your device and uses AI to scan for “disturbing” activities and block explicit websites. Covenant Eyes would be installed on all your devices to form a protective system, and Victory is where all the data is gathered: a veritable spy network against porn consumption.

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