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 church use data and ai


How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance

MIT Technology Review

These hypothetical scenes reflect real capabilities increasingly woven into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care and surveillance converge in ways few congregants ever realize. Where Big Tech's rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality once mixed like oil and holy water, this unlikely amalgam has given birth to an infrastructure already reshaping the theology of trust--and redrawing the contours of community and pastoral power in modern spiritual life. The emerging nerve center of this faith-tech nexus is in Boulder, Colorado, where the spiritual data and analytics firm Gloo has its headquarters. Gloo captures congregants across thousands of data points that make up a far richer portrait than any snapshot. From there, the company is constructing a digital infrastructure meant to bring churches into the age of algorithmic insight.