Renewed Concerns about Privacy on Grindr, Hornet, and Similar Gay Hookup Apps

Abstract

After claims that Egyptian police used gay hook-up apps to track down gay people and arrest them in 2014 (penalty for same-sex sexual activity in Egypt can lead to imprisonment for up to 17 years), Grindr, the mother of all sex hookup apps, took measures to keep its users safe. Researchers at the Graduate School of Informatics of Kyoto University in Japan have recently tweaked the trilateration method and were able to track down Grindr users even if their “show distance” feature was disabled, as they wrote in a paper entitled “Your Neighbors Are My Spies: Location and other Privacy Concerns in GLBT-focused Location-based Dating Applications,” and published last week.