Evangelicals abandon privacy to quit pornography – 03/01/2024 – Tech

In the United States, young people, the majority of whom are evangelicals, share reports on the question and answer social network Reddit about their efforts to overcome “addiction to pornography”. Some of them block erotic sites with apps like Covenant Eyes.

One user says in response to a chat colleague that for it to work, it is important to find a trustworthy person to be accountable to. It refers to the option available in apps to send reports with screenshots to a selected contact — generally, the partner or a close friend.

The idea is to embarrass the person who wants to stop consuming pornography, so that they avoid explicit content. Therefore, these applications gained the name “shameware”, something like a humiliating program.

More than 1.5 million users have already used Covenant Eyes alone (the most popular in the category), according to the company’s promotional image available on the Play Store — there are 500 thousand downloads on the Google store and the App Store does not disclose the number of downloads .

The Covenant Eyes website indicates that the app can be used for men and women to quit pornography. It would also work, according to the advertisement, for friends and spouses to help their partners or even to “protect children”.

According to the privacy policy of the self-declared Christian application, the algorithm captures screen images, blurs the texts and sends this material, encrypted, to Covenant Eyes servers, for the purpose of generating reports. The application also accesses the browsing history of the cell phone or computer.

Technically, Covenant Eyes works like spyware — a program designed to spy on a target. A well-known example in Brazil is Bruno Espião, used to snoop on cell phones without authorization. In the case of Covenant Eyes, however, both parties must consent.

The WHO (World Health Organization) does not classify pornography addiction as a specific disease. The entity, however, cites sexual compulsion in its official list of health disorders, and the uncontrolled search for explicit content can be a symptom of this illness, according to gynecologist and psychiatrist Jairo Bouer.

He says that fear of exposure to an acquaintance is not the standard or advisable treatment for sexual compulsion. “It is unlikely that an application will be enough to overcome this situation; the person will need support from a psychiatrist and perhaps therapeutic or medicinal care.”

Covenant Eyes did not respond to the report when contacted via email and the telephone numbers provided on its website.

As shameware is invasive, there may still be abuse of power by one of the parties or data security risks involved in its use.

Two recent cases in the US have thrown the spotlight on these supposedly anti-porn apps.

The first involves Republican Representative from Louisiana, Mike Johnson. He installed the app on his 17-year-old son’s cell phone. Both became allies of each other.

In addition to the relationship of authority between father and son, American citizens went online to complain about possible security breaches in the American parliamentarian’s apparatus.

Johnson presides over the US House of Representatives and has access to several sensitive and confidential documents, which Covenant Eyes can store on its servers.

The second case involves a family from the US state of Indiana. A man has been accused of keeping child pornography material on his devices and denies it.

To await trial in freedom, he and his family accepted the prosecutor’s proposal, which involved installing the Covenant Eyes app on all family members’ cell phones, according to a report by Wired.

In this situation, the accused’s wife, mother and children were under the surveillance of two Indiana prosecutors, elected “allies” in Covenant Eyes. The woman says she does not feel safe communicating with lawyers via text and that authorities have access to her 80-year-old mother-in-law’s lingerie purchases.

This use by the American Justice went against the terms of use of the application itself, which prohibit using data collected with Covenant Eyes to make formal complaints.

For the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Eva Galperin, the consent involved in the use of shameware can be relative. “If a person goes to a doctor and asks him to take off his clothes, he will probably refuse, although it is common to accept undressing in the office.”

This dynamic is repeated in Christian communities, when a pastor guides his faithful to use applications like Covenant Eyes, according to Eva.

In an interview with Sheet, the pastor of the First Independent Presbyterian Church of SP Valdinei Ferreira stated that there is great concern among evangelical families regarding the risks that young people are exposed to on the internet. At the same time, there is also a culture of vigilance and “sin recrimination.”

“Before, using the internet was a collective experience, the computer was in the middle of the room or in an Internet café, which made accessing pornography and also making contact with people with bad intentions difficult,” says Ferreira.

According to the pastor, it is common for fathers and mothers to use parental control applications, which allow parents to monitor their children’s activity or even block access to certain content — including pornography. This also happens between husband and wife.

Covenant Eyes produces and disseminates statistics that may reinforce these fears. Without disclosing the source, the application’s blog says that 56% of divorces among Christian people are motivated by “one of the parties having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites”.

Bouer states, however, that “the overwhelming majority of people have a healthy and occasional consumption of pornography.”

To find out if you suffer from sexual compulsion, Bouer recommends that the person seek help from a professional. “It’s difficult to distinguish whether someone has an exacerbated sexual desire or whether this behavior has become a compulsion.”