Grindr

The president of gay dating app Grindr is under fire for a Facebook post in which he appeared to express opposition to same-sex marriage. Scott Chen, who became president of Grindr in August after it was purchased by Chinese tech firm Kunlun Group, has since deleted the controversial post and defended himself against accusations of anti-LGBTQ bias.

In a public status posted in late November, Chen wrote in Chinese: “Some people think marriage is a holy matrimony between a man and a woman. And I think so too. But that's your own business." Puzzlingly, he also criticized Christian groups fighting marriage equality and said he would boycott HTC after reports that it had backed US groups opposed to same-sex marriage. Chen’s conflicting remarks were translated to English and published by INTO, a digital magazine owned by Grindr.

Chen responded to the INTO article with criticism, calling it “unbalanced and misleading” and defending his post in the article’s comment section. “The reason I said marriage is a holy matrimony between a man and a woman is based on my own personal experience,” he wrote. “I am a straight man married to a woman I love and I have two beautiful daughters I love from the marriage. This is how I feel about my marriage. Different people have their different feelings about their marriages. You can’t deny my feelings about my marriage.”

Chen also chastised the website for not reaching out to him for comment before publishing the article.

Grindr, the leading dating app for gay and bisexual men, is preparing to list its shares on international stock exchanges. The app’s Chinese parent company, Kunlun Group, said in a stock exchange filing to the China Securities Regulatory Commission that the listing will take place overseas at an unspecified time. The timing and locations of the share sale will be determined by regulatory approval as well as capital market conditions.

In the Shenzhen stock exchange filing, Kunlun Group said that financing arrangements would be made to support Grindr’s expansion following the completion of the IPO. The company’s board said that going public would “strengthen” Grindr’s competitiveness and support future development plans for the business.

“Grindr’s listing won’t exert a huge influence on the group’s revenues and profits,” Kunlun said in the filing, according to The Independent. “Meanwhile, Grindr can have an individual and direct financing platform which can support its expansion and long-term development.”

“It’s time to play nice.”

With those five words and a cryptic Instagram post, Grindr has hinted at what appears to be a new initiative to curb discrimination amongst daters. Its name, of course, is Kindr.

Grindr has long faced criticism from users who found the app to be an unwelcoming, and sometimes dangerous, place. Many have reported experiencing racism, transphobia, and violent hate crimes on or as a result of the platform. Some have sworn it off completely in response.

With Kindr, Grindr may finally be ready to tackle the issue head on. The Instagram post features an updated logo and a series of intertwining voiceovers describing their experiences with prejudice on the app.

Laotian-born Sinakhone Keodara was browsing Grindr when he stumbled upon a profile with a succinct description: “Not interested in Asians.”

It wasn’t the first time he encountered discriminatory language on the app, nor was it a surprise to the Asian American friend he later phoned about it. Both had repeatedly experienced racism while using dating services. This time, they decided to do something about it.

Keodara took to social media to announce plans to bring a class-action lawsuit against Grindr for racial discrimination, calling for co-plaintiffs across the United States to join the fight.

The dating app world has once again been hit with a privacy scandal. DC-based developer Trevor Faden revealed a sweeping security flaw in Grindr’s code, a glitch he says has the potential to expose sensitive information of more than 3 million daily users.

According to Faden, Grindr attaches a list of restricted profiles to each user’s account to prevent the app from displaying a profile after the user has blocked them. The list would normally remain invisible, but a loophole makes it possible to retrieve the list from Grindr’s code, thereby granting someone access to the names of every account that has blocked them.

Faden launched a website tool called C*ckBlocked that allowed users to retrieve their blocked lists by entering their Grindr username and password. Nearly 50,000 signed up, and once they did so, Faden was able to gain access to a cache of other personal information that is not publicly available on Grindr profiles, including unread messages, email addresses, deleted photos, and location data -- even for users who opted out of making their location public.

Dating apps happily boast about their sign-up rates or the number of marriages they’ve created, but they’re understandably reluctant to release less flattering figures. How many users actually stick with an app once they’ve created a profile? How many let their account lapse, or delete the app altogether? Which apps are most quickly abandoned?

In pursuit of more juicy data, mobile data company Ogury sampled more than six million mobile user profiles from its network to take a deep dive into usage habits around the world. They focused on users in the US, UK, France, Italy, and Spain who had used dating apps within the six months between January and June 2017. To present the most balanced findings, they were were careful to maintain an identical male to female ratio in each region.

Ogury’s results reveal a landscape that may surprise online dating’s biggest advocates. One chart in the report shows that dating app longevity leaves something to be desired, with most app uninstalls occuring within the first day of usage. Zoosk users, at 44.1%, are most likely to uninstall in less than 24 hours, followed by Grindr at 33.6% and Tinder at 32.9%.