The Guardian view on Grindr and data protection: don’t trade our privacy | Editorial
The gay hookup app Grindr, used by millions of people every day to find sexual partners, has been sharing its users' HIV status with third parties. There could not be a more dramatic illustration of the pervasive nature of the data economy. The first thing to note is that no one was compelled to hand this information over to the people they hoped to meet through the app or the company that runs it, all of them complete strangers. It is most unlikely that users imagined that such potentially damaging and certainly deeply private information would be shared with further companies they had never heard of, and whose business is hard for any outsiders to understand.
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.
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