Grindr — an online dating application geared toward gay, bi and transexual individuals — came under the scanner last year for revealing the location of its users. An issue that the company claimed that it had fixed. But, this year, things weren’t very different.
Grindr, along with three other dating apps — Romeo, Reco and 3fun — was found to be giving the precise location of its users, according to an investigation conducted by Pen Test Partners.
The cybersecurity firm found that a total of 10 million users could be at risk of being stalked, robbed, harassed or worse. Grindr’s 3 million daily users from one of the 13 countries where the app operates but homosexuality is criminalised could be at significantly greater risk.
Even in countries without any restrictive laws, being identified as gay could have unwanted repercussions in a person’s day-to-day — without any legal recourse to fight back.
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"Imagine a man shows up on a dating app as '200 meters away.' You can draw a 200m radius around your own location on a map and know he is somewhere on the edge of that circle. If you then move down the road and the same man shows up as 350m away, and you move again and he is 100m away, you can then draw all of these circles on the map at the same time and where they intersect will reveal exactly where the man is," said the cybersecurity firm.