Hundreds of users of the gay dating app Grindr have alleged that the company shared their private information, including their HIV status, with third parties, a law firm said Monday.
Austen Hays said she was bringing a mass data protection case to the High Court in London and claimed that thousands of Grindr users in the UK may have been affected.
The company alleges that users’ highly sensitive information, including HIV status and date of last HIV test, was provided to third parties for commercial purposes.
He said around 670 people have signed on to the lawsuit for violations that allegedly occurred between 2018 and 2020, with potentially thousands more people joining the case.
Austen Hays managing director Chaya Hanoomanjee said in a statement: “Grindr owes it to the LGBTQ+ community as it serves to compensate those whose data has been compromised and suffered suffering as a result, and to ensure that all of its users are safe when use the app, wherever you are, without fear that your data may be shared with third parties.”
A Grindr spokesperson said: “We are committed to protecting our users’ data and complying with all applicable data privacy regulations, including in the UK.
“Grindr has never shared user-reported health information for ‘commercial purposes’ and has never monetized such information.
“We intend to respond vigorously to this statement, which appears to be based on a mischaracterization of practices from more than four years ago, before the beginning of 2020.”
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This isn’t the first time Grindr’s data protection practices have come under scrutiny.
In 2021, it was fined £5.5 million by the Norwegian authorities regarding the processing of users’ personal data.
The country’s Data Protection Authority (DPA) found it breached GDPR rules by sharing data including GPS location, user profile information and even the fact that users were on Grindr, which could reveal their sexual orientation and therefore deserve special protection.
Grindr was also reprimanded in 2022 by the UK’s Information Commissioners’ Office (ICO) for failing to “provide effective and transparent privacy information to its UK data subjects in relation to the processing of their personal data”.
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