Grindr, the world’s largest LGBT dating app, has been sued for allegedly sharing personal information such as people’s HIV status with third parties. According to the lawsuit, filed at London’s High Court, they used “secret tracking technology” and illegally shared highly sensitive information with advertisers.
Law firm Austen Hays says there are more than 650 plaintiffs and “thousands” of UK users are affected. Grindr says it will “definitely respond” to the lawsuit. A spokesperson for Grindr said the company takes data protection extremely seriously, adding that the allegation “appears to be based on a mischaracterization of practices dating back more than four years.” According to Austen Hays, if the case is successful, the plaintiffs could receive thousands of pounds in damages, the BBC reported.
In the claim submitted to the Supreme Court, it is stated that the law firm wants to claim a total of more than 100,000 pounds (45.6 million forints).
Chaya Hanoomanjee, the lead attorney on the suit, said the plaintiffs had “experienced significant distress at having highly sensitive and private information shared without their consent.”
Grindr owes it to the LGBTQ+ community it serves by compensating those whose data was compromised
– He told. The dating app is used by 13 million people per month, and according to a May 2023 Ofcom report, roughly 924,000 of these users are registered in the UK. It also had the highest engagement of all dating apps, with people using it for an average of 6 hours and 49 minutes that month.
The case has been dragging on for a long time
According to the lawsuit, the company shared sensitive data with third parties for commercial purposes, in violation of UK data protection laws. According to the submission, information on the ethnicity and sexual orientation of the users was also leaked.
According to the claim, this happened mainly before April 3, 2018, although the data was also shared between May 25, 2018 and April 7, 2020.
Data analytics companies Apptimize and Localytics are named as third parties that may have accessed the sensitive data. However, they claim that a potentially unlimited number of third parties used the data to tailor ads to Grindr users. They also claim that the companies could then keep some of the shared data for their own purposes.
In 2018, it was revealed that Grindr had shared personal data, including users’ HIV status, with Apptimize and Localytics. These companies were paid to observe how people use the app in order to improve some of its features. At the time, Grindr defended the practice, saying it was in line with industry standards — but said it has since stopped sharing HIV data with those companies.
The company said it never sold the data to any advertisers.
In 2021, the Norwegian authorities fined the company 5.5 million pounds (more than 2.5 billion forints) for violating the rules of the GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation). They found that they shared user data with third parties for advertising purposes without asking for express consent.
In 2022, Grindr was reprimanded by the UK Data Protection Authority for its privacy practices. The UK’s Information Security Agency judged that the company “failed to provide effective and transparent data protection information to UK data subjects regarding the processing of their personal data.”
The BBC has reached out to Apptimize and Localytics for comment, but they have so far not responded.
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