Christian Apps are Monetizing your Prayers for Millions

A new report from Buzzfeed has delved deep into the world of Christian apps, demonstrating the lengths they’ll go to acquire and then profit off your personal information. One such entity is the Pray.com app, which has a daily user base of around 10 million people. The app lets you publicly or anonymously post your prayers so that hundreds or thousands of people can see them and utter a prayer to the Lord, with the prayer warriors coming on heavy for particularly difficult and painful overtures. This app doesn’t just have this feature; they have other resources, such as meditations, devotionals, audio bibles, and guided prayer for all subjects.

Finances. A strained marriage. A dead child, sexual abuse, a bad church, a diagnosis of cancer. Stress. Whatever it is, from the small to the insurmountable, people would pray. Behind the scenes, the app paid close attention to those prayers. According to their article:

As Katie laid out her spiritual anguish, Pray.com was data mining it, matching her actions in the app to details about her that it purchased from data brokers.

Pray.com collects data about its users in multiple ways. According to its privacy policy, the company records detailed information about users, including their physical location, the links they click on, and the text of the posts they make. Then, it supplements that information with data from “third parties such as data analytics providers and data brokers,” which can include “your gender, age, religious affiliation, ethnicity, marital status, household size and income, political party affiliation and interests… geographic location, and Personal Information.” The policy also says Pray.com shares users’ personal information, including identifiers that link their activity to specific devices, with “third parties” for “commercial purposes.”

One of the companies that the app sells/shares its data to is Facebook, resulting in people receiving targeted ads on the social media sites depending on what you prayed about. Prayed about a cheating spouse? You might be directed to a book about having a better and stronger marriage. Prayed about your weight gain? A banner promoting a juicer is available on Amazon for only $79.99. Can’t stop fighting with your kids? How about content modules about dealing with anger and a pop-up for CALM, where you can get a therapist in only 48 hours?

And these are not small operations. They recount:

A new Catholic app called Hallow, which offers devotional content with titles like “Overcoming Hopelessness,” announced in November that it had closed a $40 million Series B fundraising round. In December, a similar app called Glorify also raised $40 million. These apps, which also collect extensive information about their users, are backed by some of Silicon Valley’s best-known prospectors.

It’s not just apps but websites too. Take The Bible Gateway. Though highly useful, it is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and, for years, has been making money by mining and sharing people’s personal information, using targeted ads to cover its costs. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Buzzfeed reports:

Since 2017, (Bible Gateway) has fed data about the nearly 8 million people who have downloaded its app into an ad targeting system called NewsIQ, which infers interests about users based on their behavior across News Corporation apps and websites. NewsIQ claims it can “capture the preferences, opinions and emotions” of users for advertisers to exploit.

This is not a call to stop using those apps but rather a caution that if you’re going to use them, you need to know exactly what you’re getting into.

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