Dating app Grindr is being sued by UK-based users after the company shared personal information, including their HIV status, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, with ad companies.According to the law firm Austen Hays, which filed the claim at the High Court in London on Monday, the data was shared with third parties for commercial purposes without the users’ consent or knowledge, Bloomberg reports.The data was shared before April 2018 and again between May 2018 and April 2020. It involved two ad companies, Localytics and Apptimize, and potentially impacted hundreds of users.Grindr acknowledged that it shared sensitive user data, including HIV status and GPS location data, with the companies back in 2018; however, at the time it insisted that the move was part of a standard debugging procedure for an upcoming HIV testing reminder feature. The company was also sharing information about users’ gender, age, height, and weight with the two companies as well as users’ email addresses and Grindr profile IDs.In 2021, it was fined $6 million in Norway for violating Europe’s strict data privacy laws by sharing that data, which has already been used against some of the app’s users.
Recommended by Our Editors
Last year, some mobile tracking data from Grindr was purchased by a conservative Catholic group in Colorado, which used it to identify gay priests across the US. At the time, the company indicated that it made changes to the data it shares with its ad tech partners in 2020.
Like What You’re Reading?
Sign up for SecurityWatch newsletter for our top privacy and security stories delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
