The Guardian view on Grindr and data protection: don’t trade our privacy; Guardian, April 3, 2018

Editorial, Guardian; The Guardian view on Grindr and data protection: don’t trade our privacy

"Whether the users were at fault for excessive trust, or lack of imagination, or even whether they were at fault at all for submitting information that would let their potential partners make a better informed choice, as liberal ethics would demand, the next thing to scrutinise is the role of the company itself. Grindr has now said that it will no longer hand over the information, which is an admission that it was wrong to do so in the first place. It also says that the information was always anonymised, and that its policy was perfectly standard practice among digital businesses. This last is perfectly true, and perhaps the most worrying part of the whole story.

We now live in a world where the valuations of giant companies are determined by the amount of personal data they hold on third parties, who frequently have no idea how much there is, nor how revealing it is. As well as the HIV status, and last test date, Grindr collected and passed on to third parties its users’ locations, their phone identification numbers, and emails. These went to two companies that promise to make it easier to deliver personalised advertisements to phones based on the users’ locations and to increase the amount of time they spend looking at apps on their phones. The data was in theory anonymised, although repeated experiments have shown that the anonymity of personal information on the internet is pretty easily cracked in most cases."