Nothing Sacred: These Apps Reserve The Right To Sell Your Prayers

Spokesperson Pat Shortridge said that Pray.com “does not share users’ public, private, or anonymous prayers and specific content consumption with third parties for their commercial purposes,” but did not answer follow-up questions about whether the company shares that information for its own commercial purposes.However, an audit of Pray.com by privacy researcher Zach Edwards showed that the app shares granular data about the content its users consume with several other companies, including Facebook. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said, “This investigation makes even more clear the need for Congress to pass comprehensive consumer privacy laws to ensure that the public is in control of their most intimate personal information — not distant corporations and tech giants.” Sen. Ron Wyden said that companies “have a duty to explain if and how their users’ personal prayers are being used by marketers,” and “concealing that information would be a disgusting indication that they prioritize profits over faith.”It is common for free apps to profit from sharing their users’ data and to be vague about exactly how and with whom they share it, but users feel like Pray.com’s data practices are at odds with the deeply personal nature of prayer itself. Pray.com did not dispute that it sends data about users’ engagement with specific content to attribution vendors.This practice appears to be in line with Pray.com’s privacy policy, which says that it shares user information with “third-party vendors,” including “advertising, sale and marketing tools.” It lists a number of vendors to whom it provides this data, but LeadsRX, Branch.io, and Facebook do not appear on the list.“The Pray privacy policy, combined with the aggressive attribution vendors they partner with, creates a perfect storm to build deeply invasive profiles of religious voters,” Edwards said. In response to questions about underage users on the app, including the 12-year-old user, Shortridge confirmed that Pray.com “does not knowingly allow anyone under 16 to sign-up” for the app, but wrote that “age gating would not be relevant for our site.” The account belonging to the 12-year-old was removed from the platform after BuzzFeed News provided screenshots of it to Pray.com.In 2018, Pray.com founder Steve Gatena portrayed Pray.com in intimate terms: “While other social networks might serve as a public place for your professional identity or your social identity, prayer is more traditionally a deeply private experience.” But 10 million downloads after its launch, much of the app is public — Katie’s, Sarah’s, and Jenny’s prayers and interactions with other users are visible to anyone who joins their nearly 100,000-person public group.Pray.com’s business model could evolve just as drastically. It did not respond to questions from BuzzFeed News about how it uses Instapray users’ data.Like Pray.com, Hallow and Glorify have privacy policies that allow them to share user data with business partners for the purposes of targeted advertising and that give them “sole discretion” about when to disclose user information to governments, law enforcement officials, or other “private parties.” But representatives from Hallow and Glorify were quick to clarify that the companies have not shared user information for marketing purposes or with government entities or private parties, even though their policies allow it. Still, Hallow, Glorify, and Pray.com’s policies all categorize their users’ personal information as a business asset — perhaps one of their most valuable.Screenshots from the Glorify app“Faith is inherently social,” wrote Andreessen Horowitz general partner Connie Chan in a 2021 blog post announcing the fund’s investment in Glorify where she applauded how the app “borrows concepts like ‘streaks’ from social and workout apps.” But experts worry that the profit motive underlying engagement tactics ripped right from social media’s playbook can distort the religious experience — and make religious apps susceptible to the problems that plague social media platforms, including filter bubbles, political division, and privacy violations.Religion scholars noted that the most spiritually important conversations may not always be the most commercially viable ones, and that companies’ desire to capture users’ attention might narrow the themes explored in their devotional practice.