![]() Gracepoint, which focuses on colleges, claims to “serve students” on more than 70 campuses across the United States. 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. 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. Attached was a report from Covenant Eyes that detailed every single piece of digital content Hao-Wei Lin had consumed the prior week. “Anything you need to tell me?” reads one email Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED. Within a month of installing the app, he started receiving accusatory emails from his church leader referencing things he had viewed online. ![]() The omniscience of Covenant Eyes soon weighed heavily on Hao-Wei Lin, who has since left Gracepoint. ![]() 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 apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone-an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. 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 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.”Ĭovenant 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. 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. According to his church leader, Hao-Wei Lin says, God still loved him in spite of his “struggle with same-sex attraction.”īut Gracepoint did not leave the matter in God’s hands alone. “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. Gracepoint is the kind of evangelical Southern Baptist church that’s compelled to publicly enumerate all of the ways it’s not a cult.
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