Grindr, the world’s largest dating app for the LGBTQ+ community, is facing a lawsuit for allegedly disclosing users’ personal information, including their HIV status, to third parties.
The lawsuit, filed at the High Court in London, claims that “covert tracking technology” was used to share highly sensitive information with advertisers.
The law firm Austen Hays, representing over 650 claimants, asserts that “thousands” of UK users were affected. Grindr says it will “respond vigorously” to the claim.
A Grindr spokesperson said the company takes privacy “extremely seriously”, and added the claim “appears to be based on a mischaracterization of practices from more than four years ago.”
According to Austen Hays, if the case is successful, claimants may be awarded hundreds of pounds in damages.
The claim form submitted to the High Court seeks to claim over £100,000 in total. Chaya Hanoomanjee from Austen Hays, leading the claim, stated that “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.
Grindr, which has 13 million monthly users globally, was used by approximately 924,000 people in the UK according to a May 2023 Ofcom report. It also had the highest engagement among dating apps, with users spending an average of six hours and 49 minutes on the app that month.
The lawsuit alleges that Grindr shared sensitive user data, including information about users’ ethnicity and sexual orientation
The lawsuit alleges that Grindr shared sensitive user data, including information about users’ ethnicity and sexual orientation, with third parties for commercial purposes, violating the UK’s data privacy laws.
The data sharing is said to have occurred mainly before April 3, 2018, but also between May 25, 2018, and April 7, 2020. The claim specifically names data analytics companies Apptimize and Localytics as having access to this sensitive data but suggests that an unlimited number of third parties may have used the data to tailor advertisements to Grindr’s users.
It is also claimed that these companies may have retained some of the shared data for their own purposes.
In 2018, it was revealed that Grindr had been sharing personal data, including users’ HIV status, with Apptimize and Localytics. These companies were reportedly paid to analyze user behavior on the app to enhance its functionality. Grindr stated at the time that this practice was in line with industry standards but announced that it then stopped sharing HIV data with those companies.
Grindr has stated that it never sold user data to advertisers. However, in 2021, the company was fined £5.5 million by Norwegian authorities for breaching GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) rules by sharing user data with third-party companies for advertising purposes without obtaining explicit consent. In 2022, Grindr received a reprimand from the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, for its data protection practices, specifically for failing to provide clear and transparent privacy information to its UK users regarding the processing of their data.
