“A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country. The secretive effort was the work of a Denver nonprofit called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, whose trustees are philanthropists Mark Bauman, John Martin and Tim Reichert, according to public records, an audio recording of the nonprofit’s president discussing its mission and other documents. The use of data is emblematic of a new surveillance frontier in which private individuals can potentially track other Americans’ locations and activities using commercially available information. No U.S. data privacy laws prohibit the sale of this data. The project’s aim, according to tax records, is to ’empower the church to carry out its mission’ by giving bishops ‘evidence-based resources’ with which to identify weaknesses in how they train priests.” “The anonymous tracking of a gay priest through his phone made news around the world, with critics calling it a kind of weaponized, anti-gay surveillance.” “The project’s existence reflects a newly empowered American Catholic right wing that sees enforcing its interpretation of church teaching on sexuality and gender as an existential issue for the church and that no longer trusts bishops to do so. It is a flip of traditional church power dynamics, with the Colorado laypeople in a position to pressure bishops. At the most intimate level, it shows a new generation of surveillance technology moving into different realms, now including the religious.”—”Catholic group spent millions on app data that tracked gay priests . A group of philanthropists poured money into a Denver nonprofit that obtained dating and hookup app data and shared their work with bishops around the country, a Post investigation has found.”