New Privacy Features for Grindr Users

First up: Access and Portability. All Grindr users now have automated access to the information stored by Grindr about them (with some limitations) both on our servers and on their device. AND the information is portable—meaning we will email you a copy of your information if you so desire. We’ve provided this option through our Customer Service team for years, but now it’s automated and self-serve.  The data you’ll receive spans the things you’d most likely expect, like your public profile information and chat history, along with some other interesting data, like your sign-in history and what ads we’ve shown you to promote other Grindr features.  

Make sure to read the Data Dictionary that comes with your data to see what the information means and how it is structured in the file.  And since this file could contain a lot of sensitive information, we’ve built some serious security into the process to verify ownership of your Grindr account and your ownership of the destination email address. You’ll find Download My Data (and most other privacy features) by accessing the sidebar menu (swipe from the left), clicking “Settings,” and scrolling to the “Security and Privacy” section.

Next up: Ad Targeting Opt-Out, which allows people to opt out of having their use of Grindr remembered by our Ad Partners—meaning they won’t receive LGBTQ+ ads outside their use of the Grindr app based on the fact that they have used the Grindr app. Grindr and our partners already honor the device-wide opt-out features in iOS and Android, but this new setting is for those users who want to receive targeted ads for most of their activities but not targeted ads based on their use of the Grindr app.  As with Download My Data, you’ll find this setting by accessing the sidebar menu (swipe from the left), clicking “Settings,” and scrolling to the “Security and Privacy” section (please note that if you use other LGBTQ+ apps or sites and have not triggered an opt-out there, you may still receive LGBTQ-focused ads outside of those apps and sites).

And last up for this round of privacy announcements: Viewed Me Opt-Out.  This privacy control allows users to remove themselves from the Viewed Me feature altogether. Users who activate the opt-out won't be added to the Viewed Me list of other users, but also won't be able to access their own Viewed Me list. You’ll see this feature show up in the Privacy section of the sidebar menu in the next few weeks.

A sincere thanks to our Product and Engineering teams for making these features a reality. I’m equally thankful to our Leadership team for keeping our privacy goals a top priority and to everyone else at Grindr that helped deliver these features for our users.

We’re not done! Much more to come on the privacy front so stay tuned.

-Shane Wiley, Chief Privacy Officer | LinkedIn

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