Who Would Jesus Watch? New Facial Recognition Software Tracks Church Attendance

Oh, god.  As if it weren't "bad" enough in the eyes of The Most High that your lapsed morals caused you to skip church on Sunday to be a brunch-munching heathen or false-idolater football fan, now you've also been caught...by computer.

The lord doesn't always work in mysterious ways...sometimes it's just computers and cameras.
(Image courtesy hackingchristianity.net.)

According to Engadget, over two dozen churches can now definitively place you on a list of sinners or saints thanks to a new facial-recognition software program.  Dubbed Churchix, the software was invented by Face-Six, an Israeli security company (maybe rabbis need to keep a watch on their flocks, too.)


Churchix boasts (without committing the sin of pride, of course) a 99% accuracy rate in a controlled environment.  It works by constantly scanning the congregation like the all-seeing eyes of a judgmental, paternalistic, omniscient being, except just via closed-circuit TV cameras.  It then matches attendees' faces against a pre-existing database of "passport-like" images, the computerized archive of which looks unsettlingly like a mugshot roster.  It then presumably writes up a shame list to group-text to Jesus, The Holy Ghost, Satan, and Santa.

"Absent since Easter?!  Gotcha, bitch."
(Image courtesy glossynews.com.)

Face-Six's CEO Moshe Greenshpan told Churchmag, "Church events are the church way to interact with its members, and naturally the attendance to those events is very important...Event attendance stats help the church to measure the success of each event, see what event types are more popular than others and also track the attendance of specific members."

Ostensibly, this could be nice for popular parishes to assess their market demographic, targeting certain services or sermons more accurately to the age group they desire, and not just subtly snooping to see if you showed up with your hot single neighbor AGAIN so that they can remind you that fornication outside of wedlock is a sin. It could also aid in the observation of elderly parishioners who, if they started to significantly under-attend, could be speaking to god from a much closer vantage point and should maybe have the county coroner called to their house because it's been over three weeks now that Ethel didn't show.

We're not explaining how to dodge it or anything...
but here's a few points on what the programs look for.
(Image courtesy sott.net.)

Maybe Churchix is going to be used to score you attendance points that you can trade in at confession to knock a few Our Fathers off the weekly rosary tally.  By the way, how many is it that you owe, now?  Better show up this week and find out...or it'll be more than just god glaring at you for your unholy ways.

"Uh, and your benevolent minister didn't even mention this exists?  Yeaahhh...I'm out."
(Image courtesy sott.net.)