Finances

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 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.

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.

Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones is reconsidering the app’s signature selling point: a dating app where females make the first move. The app is scheduled to relaunch later this year, and it seems everything is on the table.

Bumble’s longtime marketing strategy and company mission was to appeal to women and help them feel empowered while using a dating app. Jones however feels that things have changed, and it has become a “burden for a subset of our customers today," according to Yahoo! Finance.

The company has been testing out alternatives, from sending prompts to help women start conversations (and reduce their anxiety about doing so) or they can choose to let their matches start conversations instead.

Dating app conglomerate Match Group has attracted its second activist investor Anson Funds Management LP, who have built a stake in the company.

Bloomberg, who broke the news, also noted that shares of Match Group fell 0.9% in mid-day trading the day the news was released.

Bloomberg also reported that Anson is trying to “change the composition” of Match Group’s Board of Directors, citing reputable sources. The investment firm also discussed with Match Group’s management about embracing AI in its products, which Match Group has already been doing.

Dating app Tinder has agreed to provide more transparency about its pricing for premium services to users in the EU. The agreement follows a probe from the European Union’s consumer watchdog agencies when complaints surfaced from daters who were charged different fees for the same service.

According to Reuters, Tinder agreed to better inform users about its pricing, specifically the personalized discounts it offered. Users who showed little interest in purchasing one of the dating app’s standard premium services were later offered personalized discounts to get them to pay for Tinder. It was also disclosed that the app was using automation to identify these users and to personalize the prices for them.

In fact, a study in Sweden in 2022 showed that Tinder was offering 36 different “personalized” price levels, ranging from about $3 U.S. to as much as $36 per month for the same premium service, which prompted the investigation.