Breaking Free

Porn Sunday. Porn and Pancakes. Porn Pastors. These are some of the buzz words associated with the ministry of XXXchurch. Often we hear about the ministry of XXXchurch here at the Covenant Eyes office. This ministry, started by Mike Foster and Craig Gross, has brought issues like pornography temptation and addiction to the forefront in the church like never before. XXXchurch has championed this cause in churches and has given resources to pastors and church leaders to help those fighting temptation. (Mike Foster, who is no longer with XXXchurch, has a website called “The Porn Talk.” It is a great resource for parents to learn practical information about Internet pornography and steps for talking to kids about it.)

XXXchurch offers a free accountability software program called X3watch. Both X3 and Covenant Eyes programs generate reports for accountability partners to view. We often get questions about the differences between the programs.

This is not intended to be “bashing” XXXchurch or their product. I’ve let the customers speak for themselves by linking to their personal blogs. I hope this post will present some simple but key differences between X3 and Covenant Eyes accountability programs.

I recommend that people do their homework before going with any program, especially when a person’s integrity is on the line.

For instance, I read one blog written by a man who put X3watch on his desktop and Covenant Eyes on his laptop and compared their services.

Despite the fact that X3watch was free, why did he end up going with Covenant Eyes?

1. Report Readability. “X3Church’s logging is much less tidy than Covenant Eyes. . . . The report for Covenant Eye is concise and clear, easy for your accountability partner to scan in a few minutes.” Because of our easy-to-read scoring, accountability partners can quickly review the reports.

2. Report Accessibility. Accountability partners “can also review reports online.” One of the drawbacks of X3watch is the reports are stored entirely on the user’s computer (which can then be erased). Because Covenant Eyes is server-based, the records cannot be erased or altered by users. The Covenant Eyes reports can be viewed on line 24 hours a day.

3. Report Accuracy. “Covenant Eyes generates nifty, accurate reports that are sorted for easy review by an accountability partner of your choosing. . . . it does a great job of catching/logging the questionable and bad stuff. . . . It’s outstanding at separating wheat (tame sites) from chaff.” Because Covenant Eyes has been around for 8 years, we’ve refined an accurate scoring system that we constantly update. X3 doesn’t score sites at all, but rather simply logs certain sites in the report. Unless the accountability partner opens the link to that site, there is no way of knowing its content (and opening the link might expose the accountability partner to objectionable material).

I can’t stress enough the benefit of a good scoring system. I recently read a blog of an X3 user. He was beginning to wonder whether the program was working. He reports that Joost sent him an email with a link to watch “trashy bikini spring break smut.” To test the X3 program, he opened the link and waited for his X3 report to come. X3 didn’t catch it: “apparently they don’t think spring break smut is bad enough to tell your wife about so the report is clean again.” I asked him to send me the link so I could run it through my Covenant Eyes program. What was the verdict? Joost came up the second highest rated URL on my report (right under MySpace) with a score of 33. A score like this can be grounds for a good conversation with my accountability partners.

I recently read another person’s blog page, someone who used Covenant Eyes and thought it did an all-round better job than X3watch. Speaking of the accuracy of the accountability report, another blogger writes about X3watch: “The drawback is that plenty of sites with porn slide in under the radar of this software so I would recommend paying the 7 bucks a month on covenant eyes.”

Similarly, another blog written by a couple missionaries and members of Wycliffe Bible Translators comments on how thorough Covenant Eyes is vs. X3watch. They highlight:

4. Report Flexibility. “Your accountability partners . . . log in to the covenanteyes.com to select how often they’d like to receive your Internet usage.” X3 watch offers weekly and biweekly reports, but Covenant Eyes allows partners to receive reports as often as they like via email and can access the report at any time from our website.

5. Complete Accountability. The Covenant Eyes report logs “every single URL with date and time.” Covenant Eyes reports all browsing activity, while X3Watch only logs sites that are deemed questionable by the X3 program. The approach used by Covenant Eyes makes it more difficult for possible holes in the system to be detected.

A Baptist pastor from Tulsa, Oklahoma, says that he has encouraged others to download X3watch and says that X3 “is great for those that don’t know where the holes are” but “is still no where near as comprehensive as CE.” He likes that X3 does not cost anything, but then remarks, “you kind of get what you pay for, as in most things.” He also likes how “extremely detailed” Covenant Eyes reports are. He likes the fact that reports are kept on the Covenant Eyes server, “so you can’t get to the report and delete it before your wife sees it, for instance.”

He also notes:

6. The Panic Button. “If you are severely tempted, there is a ‘panic button’ that you can hit that will shut down your internet access until you call tech support and get it turned back on. That also generates a report to your accountability partners.” For those who seem overwhelmed with temptation to view pornography, the panic button has proved very useful.

Another blogger writes about his reasons for liking Covenant Eyes over X3:

7. Difficult to Bypass. “Covenant Eyes is by far the best option I’ve seen to date. And I’ve tested and hacked about 15-20 of them. . . . Covenant Eyes is not going to be hackable by the common Joe. There are aspects of X3 that may leave it more susceptible.” If a program that is supposed to be a tool of accountability (like X3) is easily bypassed, then we run into the issue of a potential double sin: first we view the objectionable website, then we use our accountability program as a cover for lack of integrity.

8. Browser Support. “No matter what browser you use to access the Internet the surfing is monitored. X3Watch doesn’t have this feature.” Multiple browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) can be monitored simultaneously by the Covenant Eyes program. X3 only monitors Microsoft and Mozilla browsers, not browsers like Opera, for instance.

9. Inexpensive. Covenant Eyes “is pretty doable for most budgets.” At about a quarter-a-day, we offer a very inexpensive program. While X3watch is free, Covenant Eyes does have a Hardship Program which offers our accountability service free for those who truly cannot afford our service.

XXXchurch provides a program for the public that is free, but we know how easily it can be circumvented. Currently download.com has several reviews of X3watch, many of which give it a positive rating, but many customers write about it being very easy to bypass or turn off. One reviewer writes, “This is better than nothing, I guess, and it’s nice that they provide it for free, but Covenant Eyes (covenanteyes.com) is far superior in every way. It is worth the money.“

If someone finds freedom and integrity from using X3watch, as many have testified, then I am happy when I read about it. I’ve read great testimonies from both men and women who have found X3watch to be life-changing. What changes lives, for both X3 users and CE users, is not the quality of the software, but the quality of the accountability relationship. I do fear, however, that X3 could offer only the illusion of accuracy to an otherwise healthy accountability partnership. My prayer is that both XXXchurch and Covenant Eyes can continue to increase the quality of our products.