Gay

Image: Grindr

Grindr has announced it has partnered with Equality in Movement in Georgia and MPOWER in Ireland to connect its users in these countries with at-home HIV testing kits.

According to the company’s blog post, Grindr says it wants to address the global HIV epidemic by making it easier for its users to have access to testing. While many countries have local testing centers, they can still be difficult to access, expensive, and many people still don’t want the stigma of going to a public place to get tested.

Users in Georgia and Ireland will have dedicated buttons on the app’s interface to order at-home self-test kits, any time of day. The app wanted the access to tests to be as simple as Covid tests have become for most folks. The company also wants to encourage more people to test for HIV by alleviating the stigma with in-person tests and allowing them to test in the privacy of their own home.

Grindr’s new Chief Privacy Officer Kelly Peterson Miranda is setting the record straight regarding the app’s privacy policies and use of personal data following allegations and a recent lawsuit.

The interview with The Record Media takes place in the wake of several allegations that Grindr has violated user privacy rights when it comes to their personal data.

The LGBTQ dating app was sued in April for allegedly sharing the HIV status of its users with third parties without their consent. Before that, its former privacy officer Ronald De Jesus has said that the company stored user data, including photos and videos, even after people deleted their accounts, which violated the app’s privacy policy.

And last year, the Electronic Privacy Information Center appealed to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Grindr for its history of abuses.

Dating app Grindr has been sued in the U.K. for allegedly selling the HIV status of its users to third parties.

According to the BBC, the claim was filed in London’s High Court, and alleges that “covert tracking technology” was used to track and illegally share the personal health status of users with advertisers. More than 650 claimants were affected along with reportedly thousands of other U.K. users.

Sharing personal and sensitive data of users with third parties without their consent is illegal in the U.K.

The lawsuit says the information shared with third parties includes the ethnicities and sexual orientations of users. It also says the sharing of such information took place primarily before April 2018, though some data was shared as recently as April 2020. The lawsuit specifically names two companies which help app developers analyze user engagement, Apptimize and Localytics, as involved third parties with access to the data. The lawsuit also claims that these outside firms might have retained some of the sensitive data for their own purposes.

Grindr says it will be offering the biggest change to its platform in the app’s history, describing the app’s new purpose to be a “gayborhood in your pocket.”

According to Axios, the gay dating app was under pressure from both users and investors to give a facelift to the app, which has remained essentially the same for the past few years. Arison has been teasing these changes lately, including the new feature Roam which will allow users to set a location on the app to where they are traveling, so they can match and message with people before arriving.

The new features are currently being tested and Arison plans to launch them later this year.

Dating apps are adding geolocation sharing features to their platforms, but a new investigation found that it’s possible to identify the exact location of a user with stunning accuracy.

According to a new report from Mashable, a study by Checkpoint Research’s Alexey Bukhteyev found that trilateration can be used to find the precise location of a dating app user. Most dating apps use location filters to match people who are relatively close to each other, but trilateration can find the exact position of a user by measuring distances from multiple points, accurate to within a few meters. This technique can also circumvent privacy protections built into these apps.

Bukhteyev found this particularly worrying on LGBTQ+ dating apps, two of which were used in his investigation, according to Mashable. One of the issues is that in countries that don’t recognize the rights of LGBTQ+ people, local and government officials can locate and target dating app users with trilateration. Recently, officials in the Middle East were targeting people on gay dating apps, asking them to meet for a date, and arresting them when they arrived.

Grindr has hired the two founders of Athena, a fitness community app, to join its team.

According to Axios, the gay dating app company hired Athena co-founder and CEO AJ Wolf as a senior manager of product finance, while co-founder and technology chief Max Roche is joining as a senior iOS engineer.

Axios noted that Grindr did not acquire any of Athena’s assets.

There is not much detail about the hirings, but Grindr has been looking into areas outside of dating to build community on its platform. One area Grindr CEO George Arison has focused on is travel. The company recently released a feature called Teleport to allow users to set their location to a place they plan to travel so they can connect with others before they arrive. Tinder has a similar feature called Passport.