Grindr pledges to no longer share users’ HIV status with third parties

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media apps have found themselves under intense media scrutiny, Grindr being one of them. The gay hookup app recently found itself in hot water when it was discovered it shared users’ data with other companies, and that these other companies are potential sources for hacking and leaks.

Norwegian organisation Sintef found that companies could identify specific users because they could have access to their GPS data, phone ID and email. “Personal information is shared unencrypted, allowing people, companies, or governments to listen on a network to discover who is using Grindr, where they are precisely located during a day, how do they look, what do they like, what do they browse,” Sintef wrote in its report findings.

Sintef also found that users’ HIV status could be accessed by third parties as well if users’ shared that on their profile: “It is unnecessary for Grindr to track its users HIV Status using third-parties services. Moreover, these third-parties are not necessarily certified to host medical data, and Grindr’s users may not be aware that they are sharing such data with them.”

Various people and organisations have pointed out how unsafe it is for this data to be available, especially in homophobic countries, or places where HIV positive people would be discriminated against.

Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist and security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Buzzfeed: “Even if Grindr has a good contract with the third parties saying they can’t do anything with that info, that’s still another place that that highly sensitive health information is located... If somebody with malicious intent wanted to get that information, now instead of there being one place for that — which is Grindr — there are three places for that information to potentially become public.”

Grindr has since backed down from defending its third-party sharing and has said it will update its policies.

Grindr’s security chief, Bryce Case said that Grindr’s “data-sharing practices were a misunderstanding of what was being shared and with whom. I understand the news cycle right now is very focused on these issues, (but) I think what’s happened to Grindr is, unfairly, we’ve been singled out.”

Scott Chen, Grindr’s chief technology officer, maintains that privacy has also been a priority: “The inclusion of HIV status information within our platform is always regarded carefully with our users’ privacy in mind, but like any other mobile app company, we too must operate with industry standard practices to help make sure Grindr continues to improve for our community.”

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