Popular gay hookup app Grindr, which has over 3.6 million daily active users worldwide, is under the scanner for sharing its users’ HIV status with two other companies. According to a recent report from BuzzFeed News, Antoine Pultier, a researcher at the Norwegian nonprofit SINTEF, has identified that Grindr shares its users’ location and HIV status with Apptimize and Localytics.
SINTEF’s analysis also revealed that Grindr was also sharing its users’ location, “tribe”, sexuality, relationship status, ethnicity, and phone ID to other third-party advertising companies. It’s worth noting that this information, unlike the HIV data, was shared via “plain text”, which can be easily hacked.
Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist and security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News:
In response, Grindr told BuzzFeed News that the services they receive from Apptimize and Localytics help them make the app better. In a statement regarding the matter, Grindr’s CTO Scott Chen was quoted saying:
Grindr’s Chief Security Officer Bryce Case has since revealed that the company will stop sharing data with the two companies when the app’s next update is released. However, he defended Grindr’s decision to share the data and argued that Apptimize and Localytics were just tools to help the app function better. He even added that the information was being “conflated with Cambridge Analytica” and the company did not sell the user data to any third-parties.
