Grindr Reveals HIV Status, Location Data to Third Parties

The privacy morasse plot thickens.

BuzzFeed reported yesterday via an independent data analysis by an outside research firm that show popular gay dating app is sharing its users’ HIV status with two outside companies.

The gay hookup app Grindr, which has more than 3.6 million daily active users across the world, has been providing its users’ HIV status to two other companies, BuzzFeed News has learned.

The two companies — Apptimize and Localytics, which help optimize apps — receive some of the information that Grindr users choose to include in their profiles, including their HIV status and “last tested date.”

Because the HIV information is sent together with users’ GPS data, phone ID, and email, it could identify specific users and their HIV status, according to Antoine Pultier, a researcher at the Norwegian nonprofit SINTEF, which first identified the issue.

If the Nixonian saying was “It’s not the cover up but the crime,” perhaps the 21st century privacy counterpart should be along the lines of, “It’s not the first use of the information, it’s the unintended third party use.”

As BuzzFeed’s article points out, Grindr is a unique place for openness about one’s HIV status, but to have that information shared with third parties that an individual was never notified about…that’s a safety risk, and one that should whose mitigation should best be left with the individual and not Grindr.

George Orwell’s not only spinning in his grave, he’s doing triple axels in multiples of three at a time.

Privacy may not be dead, but it sure has taken a beating in the first three months of 2018.