Let’s face it, pornography is practically everywhere, it has become a major problem for Christian men. 91% of children in a Christian home were exposed to pornography while growing up, and 60% of Christian men have sought out some sort of pornography according to the National American Mission Board. It’s a huge problem that is not going to go away any time soon.
What’s the solution? Some families have decided they need to keep the internet out of their home all together, while others have decided to use a content filter. However, the internet is everywhere and entrenched in our daily lives. We need it to bank, read about the world news and stay in touch with the world, so that is not much of an option. Most content filtering software suites do not work very well. It’s impossible to find every last bit of pornography on the internet and add it to a big block list. Additionally these filtering suites often block a lot of perfectly acceptable content.
XXXChurch.com, which bills it as the “#1 Christian Porn Site,” teaches about pornography, its dangers, and how you can avoid it on the internet. It offers help for men addicted to pornography and connects Christian men to be online accountability partners. As part of their ministry, they have created a piece of software called “X3 Watch.”
X3 Watch is an accountability software program. For all intensive purposes, it’s a snitch to your family or accountability partners. Whenever you browse to a website on the internet which might contain some questionable material, X3 will make a note of the website, save it to a hidden file, and will email two people who you choose the list of suspected questionable websites as the end of the month. They state the information is “meant to encourage open and honest conversation between friends and help us all be more accountable.
The software has its purpose, but is not a be all and end all. First of all, anyone wanting to get around the system can simply exit the program and go to a dirty website and then open the program back up again. X3 will note that the user exited the program, but the dirty websites will not appear on the monthly email. So this is probably not a great product to make sure your children are behaving online, however what it is very effective for Christian Men who have accountability partners. It might not stop every instance, but men will be a lot more hesitant to go to those websites knowing that their buddy will know about it as well.
In our testing of the software, we have found that the software reports a lot of false positives. The software reported Boundless.org, a site for young Christian individuals as inappropriate, so just because an item on the list, it does not necessarily mean it’s all that bad. Other than that, it did find a number of bad websites which we had visited and informed the recipient of our activities.
The software it self is free. A pro version of the software is available for $14.99 which supports the XXXChurch ministry. The pro version allows you to change the interval of emailing and allows you to send the report to more individuals. Additionally it features the ability for multiple individuals to be on the same computer, a “weight” detector which is how likely the site is inappropriate, and an automatic update checker.
Reference:
- X3 Watch (x3watch.com)XXX Church (xxxchurch.com)
