Privacy

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.

A new study from the research team at Mozilla has found that dating apps are collecting and selling more information than its users might be aware of.

According to The Washington Post, Mozilla found that 80 percent of the dating apps they reviewed – which include popular apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge among others – may share the personal data of users with their advertisers. In fact, the privacy policies that users must agree with to use these platforms make it clear that their personal information could be sold. But how many are reading the fine print?

Spark Networks’ privacy policy was particularly specific and alarming for its apps JDate, Christian Mingle and Elite Singles. It stated that the apps might collect “sensitive information” including political affiliation, union memberships, and your “sexual preferences and experiences,” according to the Post.

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.

A new study has found that when dating app users can share disappearing photos with other users, it can increase matches and user engagement.

According to Phys.org, researchers found that enabling people to share photos that would disappear within a certain timeframe helped them overcome fears related to privacy and helped with conversation starters. Many dating app users are not willing to share personal details about themselves when they meet new people on dating apps, making it more difficult to connect and have deeper conversations, according to the study.

The large-scale randomized field experiment was conducted with more than 70,000 users of a China-based dating app. The experiment featured both a control group where subjects uploaded a photo that would stay posted, like in traditional dating app profiles, and a treatment group where users could upload ephemeral photos. They found that users in the treatment group sent more personal photos compared with the control group.

Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones sat down with Tech Crunch to discuss women on the platform no longer making the first move, potential new safety features, AI, and other plans to enhance the app.

In a recent interview Jones shared that she is reconsidering the basic premise of Bumble: that women make the first move. Instead, she said that women should be given the choice of whether they want to make the first move or not, giving them more control in their dating experience.

Jones assured Tech Crunch that her goal of empowering women on the platform remains steadfast: “Our brand awareness is so high, it’s amazing. And if you ask anybody about Bumble, they’ll say it’s about women, and the core of that is not changing. We are a company that really cares about women’s empowerment.”

Grindr’s CEO George Arrison is planning to monetize the app more aggressively, including launching an AI chatbot and putting previously free features behind a paywall.

News website Platformer broke the news about Grindr’s plans to launch an AI-based “boyfriend” chatbot feature that can engage in sexually explicit conversations with users, for a price. Some employees have expressed weariness, as the AI-generated conversations could be based in part on private chats between other human users, pending their consent.

Platformer also learned that Grindr is revising its terms of service to ask people signing up if the company can train their AI models on their personal data, which can include direct messages. This is likely to be a privacy issue going forward for other dating apps who could pursue employing user data to train AI.