Beware: Grindr is out to get your personal info

Public Service Announcement: Grindr is reportedly pursuing members relentlessly for personal details to help train new AI powered features, raising concern amongst privacy advocates and users.

Members are reporting that they have been receiving the following message on the app: “We ask for your consent to use certain types of your data that privacy laws define as sensitive to help deliver AI Technology, enabling a more personalised Grindr experience for the Grindr community.”

If users consent, Grindr will collect a range of sensitive information, including: ethnicity, pronouns, gender, “looking for” status, tribe and tags, sexual position, profile text, chat message content, and precise GPS location.

However, Grindr says it will not collect information about HIV status, last testing date, or vaccination records.

While users have the option to decline the invitation to share their data and can opt out at any time through the app’s privacy settings, users have reported that they keep getting prompted to share their data when they decline the invitation, sometimes more than once a day. One user in Sydney said:

“I’ve had this pop-up reappear every day since I first declined to share my data … It just comes back again regardless of what you do – sometimes more than once a day,” adding “I’ve seen this pop-up more times than I received Trumpet of Patriot texts during the federal election.”

Grindr users are advised that they should exercise extreme caution when it comes to sharing data with the app, given Grindr’s poor handling of users’ personal data in the past.

In 2024, a suit was filed in the United Kingdom alleging that Grindr disclosed user information about their health, sex lives and sexual orientation to advertisers without user knowledge — breaching data protection laws. That lawsuit came two years after the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office reprimanded Grindr for failing to “provide effective and transparent privacy information to its UK data subjects in relation to the processing of their personal data.”

The U.K. data protection watchdog also said that the company “infringed” on regulation requiring personal data be “processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject.”

And in 2021, it was reported that a Catholic news outlet was able to obtain app data signals from Grindr and link them to a Catholic priest, who subsequently resigned from his job. It was later reported that a conservative Catholic organisation spent millions of dollars to buy mobile phone data to “out” priests, with the vast majority of the data coming from Grindr.

Also in 2021, Grindr was fined US$11.7 million by Norway’s Data Protection Authority after it was found to be illegally disclosing user data to advertising firms. In a January 2020 report, The Norwegian Consumer Council said that Grindr shared detailed user data with third parties involved in advertising and profiling, such as a user's IP address, advertising ID, GPS location, age and gender.