Keeping Minors Off Grindr

Grindr is more than a casual dating app. It’s a social, community, and lifestyle platform for the GBTQ+ community, the digital gayborhood in your pocket. Our users average more than an hour a day on the app chatting, building relationships, getting advice when traveling to a new city, and networking.

Critically, Grindr is only for adults aged 18 and over who agree to our Terms, Community Guidelines, and Privacy Policy. We do not want minors on the platform and go to great lengths to prevent them from posting a profile to use the app. Our team continuously evaluates and enhances our multi-prong strategy to monitor for, screen, block, and remove underage user profiles and communications by:

• Categorizing our app under the most age-restrictive settings in the Apple and Google app stores so that only devices permitted to access adults-only apps can download Grindr. Unlike virtually every other major social media and online dating service, you cannot create a Grindr account on the open web, only by downloading the app from major app stores.

• A mandatory age gate barring prospective users who enter a birth date indicating they’re younger than 18. Not only are they unable to create an account and publish a profile at the time, but their device is banned from creating a Grindr account until they turn 18.

• A robust and dedicated human content moderation and customer support team that reviews user profiles and communications and bans accounts at the device level if they are suspected to belong to minors or discuss topics related to minors. 

• AI and machine learning tools that review user-provided information to proactively identify and ban problematic accounts. 

• Providing users with easy-to-use reporting tools and encouraging them to report problematic user profiles, messages, or other content. Our users play an active role in reporting accounts that they suspect may belong to minors or anyone seeking minors, which are then reviewed by our moderation team.

• Cooperating with law enforcement and other relevant third parties to support investigations and help hold those who misuse our platform accountable. Our Trust & Safety team is trained to identify, escalate, and, where appropriate, report child endangerment scenarios to law enforcement in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).  

• Partnerships with child protection organizations like Thorn to support the automatic identification, banning, and reporting of child sexual abuse material. We are members of and regularly work with online child safety groups, including the Tech Coalition and WeProtect Global Alliance, to combat the industry-wide challenge of minors accessing age-inappropriate apps and content.

Although there is currently no way to perfectly verify the age of every person seeking to use an adults-only online platform, and some tools raise significant privacy concerns, technology capabilities are constantly evolving, creating opportunities for new solutions to prevent minors from using platforms like Grindr. GenAI is creating many such opportunities. We have a team of engineers working on new AI-based tools to further improve our ability to identify and remove underage users. As these tools are built, we hope to be in a position to make them available to other platform operators as well. 

We at Grindr work hard to try to provide an accessible and safe platform for adult GBTQ+ people to build community. Our approach to keeping minors off the platform is central to that work. If you see or suspect any underage activity on Grindr, please report it immediately here or in the app by tapping the Ø icon in the upper-right corner of the screen → Report → Underage.