Glorify

In a 2021 interview with TechCrunch, Glorify's 22-year old co-founder Ed Beccle said of his Christian-targeted wellness app, "We don’t monetize through ads; the user really isn’t the product." Which sounds great. However, we're not so sure it's true based on what we found in Glorify's privacy policy.

Glorify's privacy policy clearly states the personal information you provide them is considered a business asset. It also clearly states that while they don't sell your personal information, they can use it for a good deal of targeted advertising and sharing with third-parties for tailored marketing purposes. And Glorify says they can combine your personal information with information they get from third-party sources such as gender and birth date and they can use that information to provide you with information about their business, products, and services. Which means they can use all that personal information to try and sell you more stuff.

Glorify also says they can create anonymized and aggregated information that includes location information and says they may use this information in a number of ways, including research, internal analysis, analytics, and any other legally permissible purposes. That's a fairly broad statement. And here is where we must remind you that it has been found to be relatively easy to re-identify such information, especially if location data is included.

In that same TechCrunch interview, Glorfy's co-founder stated, "I believe the engaged audience that we will have will probably have a higher propensity to pay for all sorts of other products that we release. ... [we think we can] take that audience and direct them to other products that we've created, where they’ll have high propensity to pay." It's a good reminder that prayer apps come at a cost, as with so much on the internet in our existing data economy,