Hookup app Grindr is accused of revealing users' HIV status in a lawsuit filed in London's High Court. The lawsuit claims that user data was shared with Grindr's advertisers via "covert tracking technology," identifies more than 650 claimants, and claims thousands of users were affected.
Chaya Hanoomanjee from Austen Hays, who is the lawyer leading the claim, said the claimants "experienced significant distress over their highly sensitive and private information being shared without their consent"."Grindr owes it to the LGBTQ+ community it serves to compensate those whose data has been compromised," she said.The dating app is used by 13 million people every month, and an Ofcom report from May 2023 found that it was used by roughly 924,000 people in the UK.
This is slow-moving fallout from the 2018 exposure of Grindr sharing user data, including HIV status, with ad tech companies. The company has had many security woes, and is one of the larger companies to have been fined for GDPR violations. Post-Brexit Britain has punished it for similar infractions.
In 2022, Grindr was reprimanded by the UK's data watchdog over its data protection practices. The Information Commissioner's Office ruled that the company had failed to "provide effective and transparent privacy information to its UK data subjects in relation to the processing of their personal data".
Perhaps the single worst social media platform to provide accurate, real personal information to, which is funny when you consider what one uses it for.
