Imagine trying to replicate the motion of the wax in a lava lamp by using modeling clay. It’s very difficult to make modeling clay move at all, let alone have it mimic motion. Holding someone accountable can feel a lot like that. With people jumping around between work computers and home computers, smartphones, and tablets, it can feel a little intimidating to try to figure out when and why a person may have stumbled online.
That’s why 2016 will be the most ambitious year yet for Covenant Eyes. We’re breaking new ground in research and technology, all to provide better service to our users.
Better Education
Battling pornography, whether as a parent, as an individual who is struggling, or as a leader equipping others, is challenging. This is why Covenant Eyes invests so much in providing you educational articles, blog posts, e-books and videos. In 2015, we released an updated version of Porn and Your Husband, and two new e-books, More than Single: Finding Purpose Beyond Porn, and Fight Porn in Your Church.
Better Reporting
Covenant Eyes uses proprietary techniques to classify website visit types such as “visited” or “secondary.” However, sometimes we don’t know how to classify something. Through improved techniques, we found a way to classify more websites than ever before, making your reports cleaner and easier to understand.
If you are a Covenant Eyes Accountability Partner, you are interested in the sites your partner visits, but you likely want to know what led them to that site, what they did there and what happened afterwards. We’re almost ready to add Incident Reports to the Accountability Report to show you what happened before Highly Mature content was accessed. Was the user searching for inappropriate content, or did they stumble on it accidentally? This information should help create better accountability conversations about intention as well as help identify common triggers that can be avoided in the future.
One of the biggest criticisms we’ve received for our accountability app for iPhone is that we don’t provide any accountability or filtering for the Safari browser. We’ve been working on a new, patent-pending way to expand our service to provide better coverage across your entire device, including Safari.
Better Service
Covenant Eyes just opened a second location here in Owosso, MI. More than 100 people attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony, including media, local elected officials and leaders, and Covenant Eyes staff members. The location will house nearly 40 customer service representatives to provide you with shorter wait times and even more personalized service. We plan to use this site to work through some of the kinks in operating multiple locations so we can open offices across the country and possibly internationally.
Lastly, we have heard countless requests for improved reporting of photos and videos. Using a new process built off state-of-the-art technology, we are thrilled to announce that we have developed a new, patent-pending image recognition software. Short-term, this means better reporting of inappropriate images…and it has some long-term implications for video as well.
Want to see this in action? There is a demo that shows some of the capabilities of this new system in the video above. The moment of the kiss is flagged as possibly inappropriate (represented by the dip downward). Compare that to the analysis of a pornographic video, where the line stays at the bottom of the graph (“pornographic content”) until the very end, which is presumably when the clothing goes back on. Remember, this isn’t necessarily how it will appear on your Accountability Report…but it’s exciting, and we wanted you to share our excitement.
We are still researching this technology, and are in the process of deciding how to report it and integrate it into our software and apps, but we’re getting close. Look for an announcement with more details this summer.
We’re excited to offer you these exciting updates, and we’ve got even more planned. Leave us a comment to tell us what features you’re most excited about or what you’d like us to pursue.
Will the iOS upgrade be available for all users or will it only be available in beta to test users? If so, how can a person be a beta test user?
Hello Jeff,
Great question! At some point, hopefully soon, we will have our app available for beta testing. We do have a group of beta testers who will use the app and report any bugs or hiccups to our developers. If you are interested you can become a beta tester, if not, the iOS upgrade will be available for ALL users once it’s put in the App Store. I’m sure we will also be sending out an email alert to let our user’s know that the new and improved all is going to be available. Feel free to contact our Customer Service if you have any further questions or are interested in becoming a beta tester, 877.479.1119.
Best regards,
Annelise
It is now June. Will the iOS update be for monitoring across other apps be coming this month? Please let us know a timeline if you can! Thanks!
Hello Nick – we are very, very close. As with all significant updates, there are unanticipated bugs, and TMS has presented us with a few but I assure you it is coming, and we are all very, very excited. Thank you for hanging on! Look for it this summer.
Peace,
Chris
Is there an update on when the big IOS release is happening this month?
Hi Nate – we are close! Stay tuned….
Still waiting to see the new iPhone / iPad release with system wide monitoring. We are nearly at the end of May, and still no sign of the promised update :-(
Hello Matt – we are close. Thank you for sticking with us! We are definitely trying to get this functionality out to our customers this summer.
-Peace, Chris
Covenant Eyes
Hi, It’s May…an update on full iPhone protection? Very Eager to get this!
Hi Richard,
Thank you for your question! I spoke with some of our developers concerning the progress of our new iPhone app and this is their response:
“Most of the pieces of the product are now in place. We have had some success with a limited internal testing group and truthfully we really hope to have a public beta available soon. The app is “functional” at this point, in that all of the moving pieces are in place and are working. But we have yet to reach a level of polish where the app can provide long term service levels that we are happy with. As soon as we have a fix, we will spend probably a week doing testing internally, before providing it to external testers who are willing to try out the app.”
Our developers have been working very hard at providing our users with a stable and functional and we’re hoping this fix comes soon! If you have any further questions feel free to call our Customer Support at 877.479.1119
Best regards,
Annelise
Hi there. Can someone from you team look into better monitoring of contents viewed by Team Viewer’s remote viewing? I think this is necessary and it’s pointless to have monitoring yet content viewed thru another computer can’t be monitored. And also to be able to monitor content from flash drives? Accountable to you seems to be able to monitor both. Thanks
Hello Joyce,
Thank you for your feedback! I can definitely pass it along to our developers to look into! If you have any other feedback or need assistance feel free to give our Customer Support a call at 877.479.1119.
Best regards,
Annelise
Will apps like YouTube be monitored through iOS when the updates occur?
Hello Melissa,
Thank you for your great question! It is our goal to be able to extend our protection to all apps on the iOS devices. So, in short yes, once we release the update we should be able to monitor apps like Youtube. Thank you for your patience and we hope to release the update for iOS as soon as possible!
Best regards,
Annelise
Hi there,
This all looks great, except that it still leaves non iPhone and iPad users as second class citizens, unable to use some of your features. Are there plans to provide a level – and just – playing field between iPhones and android phones? Otherwise, Android users are subsidising iPhone users, which does not seem right somehow.
Many thanks.
Hi David,
You bring up some great points and a great question! One announcement that was left out of the article, on accident, was that we are hoping to release android filtering in 2016 as well! It has been our goal to have our services available across all platforms and we are so close! Our developers have been working very hard to develop the android filtering and it’s currently in internal testing. I do not have a release date yet, but we will definitely notify our users as soon as it’s available. We appreciate your patience as we approach the finish line and we hope to have the filtering available as soon as possible. If you have any further questions please feel free to give our Customer Service a call at 877.479.1119.
Best regards,
Annelise
Hi Annelise,
I have been considering CE for my family, but I’m not sure of the value if Android is not taken seriously (Android app development lag, left out “on accident”, no release date).Does CE have anything of value for my android devices?
Thanks,
Rod
Hello Rod,
Great question! Covenant Eyes for android presently monitors and will report activity from any android tablet, phone, or kindle. The monitoring includes app activity from inside of the Facebook app, Youtube app, Google Search app and many more. All of the information about accountability for the android devices can be found HERE.
Currently we do have a beta version of Android app, that includes filtering, available. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester so you can begin using the Android app with filtering right now, you are more than welcome to call our Customer Service at 877.479.1119 to get set up. If not, we should have a full release of our Android app with filtering available very soon. Thank you again for your question!
Best regards,
Annelise
Your recent blog stated: “One of the biggest criticisms we’ve received for our accountability app for iPhone is that we don’t provide any accountability or filtering for the Safari browser. We’ve been working on a new, patent-pending way to expand our service to provide better coverage across your entire device, including Safari. Look for expanded accountability for your iPhone and iPad® in May.”
One question I have is will this apply to apps with internet access? I had to currently delete my Bible App of all things because I found a loophole in it where you can access the internet. Once Google is located, then porn can be accessed. This is very frustrating due to the fact that the Bible App has been a source of encouragement to me in my fight against porn.
Any thoughts on that?
Jay Jenkins
I’ve had an iPhone for a few years now and currently CANNOT have access to the internet on it. Covenant eyes works through Safari, in order to use other apps I’ve had to block access to most websites, this also blocks access to the internet via Covenant Eyes browser. Although this has relieved a lot of temptation and stress it also creates some frustration. I hope that the updates in May will change this.
Hello Dillon,
I certainly believe that our update that’s coming will fix all of these issues you are experiencing and I apologize for all of these issues. I agree that they can be frustrating. Presently, our Covenant Eyes app can only monitor and filter activity inside of the Covenant Eyes browser. We do suggest disabling Safari through restrictions, as well as turning off Installing Apps to prevent the installation of other browsers. Due to the Covenant Eyes app being rated 17+ by apple, we do require that the App restriction be set to 17+, which is another reason why disabling the installation of apps is the better route to take. Safari does have filtering you can enable via the restrictions, but after testing it we’ve experienced a lot of inconsistency and because it covers EVERY app, the iOS filter does override our filter and can potentially block websites in the Covenant Eyes app that otherwise would probably be allowed through our filter.
I hope this better explains how our current app for iOS devices works. We appreciate your patience and we are looking forward to releasing our update for iOS soon!
Best regards,
Annelise
Hello Jay,
You asked a great question! It is our goal to provide more protection through the apps with internet access as well. So, yes our updated app for the iOS devices should include protection across those apps as well. Thank you for your patience and we hope to release our latest version as soon as possible. If you have any further questions feel free to call our Customer Service at 877.479.1119
Best regards,
Annelise
PLEASE get the filtering capabilities on Android!! Why are we being left out and paying the same as those who get the ‘full’ benefits? Our families need and would appreciate it too.
Hello Chasidy,
Great news! Our developers are working diligently on filtering for Android! I think that specific announcement in the blog post got missed, but we do hope to have Android filtering available as soon as possible! We agree that the filtering would be beneficial for many families and we appreciate your patience. There will definitely be a big announcement once it’s available, so be on the lookout!
Best regards,
Annelise