On iPhones and iPads with iOS (operating system) 15.1 or higher, Covenant Eyes uses Screen Accountability in Safari®, device-wide domain (website) monitoring, and filtering.
Screen Accountability in Safari®
If your iPhone® or iPad® has iOS 15.1 or higher, Screen Accountability (our monitoring service) screen-captures your activity in Safari®.
- You can now safely use the Safari® browser to search the web, watch YouTube videos, and more while being safely monitored with Screen Accountability via our Safari® extension.
-
Recap, Suggestive, and Explicit screenshots from Safari will appear in the Victory app's Activity Feed or email Check-in.
- On older iPhones and iPads, we can't screen-capture Safari® and only take screenshots inside the Covenant Eyes browser app.
Domain Monitoring
Covenant Eyes cannot screenshot the activity of your apps on iPhones and iPads. So, instead of taking screenshots of your apps, we monitor all your domains (web traffic) with a VPN-like background process.
- In the Victory app's Activity Feed, we'll list explicit domains as Likely-Explicit DNS Connections. If you use our filter, you will see "blocked" for any explicit domains.
- We created and patented a process that works similarly to a VPN. We call this process our Tunneled Monitoring Service (TMS). TMS makes a secure tunnel in the background of your device that lets us monitor your activity.
- A traditional VPN allows your device to connect securely to an external source or a server. Our TMS runs on your device but doesn't connect to an external source.
- TMS monitors your domain activity. A domain is a website, like ad.google.com or nike.com. Covenant Eyes reports the root of the domain (e.g., facebook.com) instead of the entire website URL (e.g., Facebook.com-user-profile-john-doe).
Website Filtering & Blocking
The filter is an optional service that runs in the background of your iPhone®/iPad® and blocks explicit websites across all browsers (Google Chrome, Safari®, etc.) and apps on your device.
- There are two Blocking Levels: Standard (default) and Strong.
- Each level has a Custom Website List, so you can block or allow specific websites.
Apps & The App Store®
The Covenant Eyes iPhone® app cannot block or control the apps downloaded from the App Store®.
-
We suggest using Screen Time (Apple's device controls) to disable the ability to install apps.
- Or you can use Screen Time to set an app age setting for the entire device.