We want to share with you what we are hearing, and what we’re doing as a result.

Since our last Voice of the Customer report, we’ve seen a clear theme around community resources and education, showing how much our community is engaged, curious, and wanting to learn more about themselves and each other.

Monkeypox

We’ve heard from many of you that Monkeypox is top of mind. To help get you the information you need, we’ve linked to global Monkeypox resources on our help page, which can be easily accessed either from the home page of our help center or from the sidebar inside our app. This help page has quickly become our #1 most viewed article.

Grindr for Equality, the social justice arm of Grindr, is partnering with public health groups around the world to share information with folks that’s specific to their area. We also had an Instagram Live session with the White House special task force as well as our partners at Building Healthy Online Communities, and have sent BHOC's national US vaccine site locator tool to all US users in both English and Spanish.

We’re working on more ways to help our users, both within the app and outside it by advocating for increased access to testing and vaccination. More to come.

Gender Resources

“Cis” and “Cis Man” were two of the most common searches within the help center this quarter. (Note: searches are actually typing something into the search bar which is an incredibly strong signal of interest.) This search was so specific, it was a mystery as to why, until we realized that the gender identity FAQ page (linked to from an in-app tooltip) had “If I’m cis and someone asks my pronouns, is it offensive to give a joking answer?” as the first result. Folks wanting to learn more about gender immediately came across a term they didn’t know, and searched for it in our center.

We’ve now highlighted “What does it mean to be cisgender?” as the first FAQ entry to make it easier to find, and we’re gathering together to see what else we can do to support those who want to learn more about the LGBTQ+ community.

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Warnings

We’ve heard from you that you’d like more communication and transparency around content moderation decisions and rules, as well as the opportunity to correct behavior before being banned. This is especially true for situations where you believe you weren’t necessarily trying to cause harm to others.

We’re happy to announce that we have now added an in-app warning for commercial activity. This is in addition to the existing warning for harassment and bullying.

Scam Awareness Guide

We updated our Scam Awareness Guide, and sent it out in an inbox message- 20% of you clicked through to read the full guide – that’s a high level of engagement!

We’ll continue to update and share our guides periodically, and are so glad it’s been helpful to so many of you.

Bugs And Outages

Unfortunately, we’re still hearing from you that bugs and outages are a concern. We’re always working to eliminate these issues, and want you to know that bug reports are triaged by a dedicated support team and shared with our Engineers to help them reproduce the error and find solutions.

The current 7-day average for how many users had a crash free experience is 99.3% on iOS and 99.79% on Android. Though this is an improvement from last quarter, we still want this number to be at 100%.

-Alice Hunsberger, VP, Customer Experience | LinkedIn

Meet Marielle Rodriguez (she/her), our Product Manager working on our Anti-Abuse team at Grindr!

‍Marielle has been with Grindr for just over a year and has loved the work, the learning, and the achievements that Grindr has made in that time. Previously, Marielle was a Test Manager for a team of testers and had been part of the Quality Assurance world for more than 15 years before transitioning to product management. One of Marielle’s most recent accomplishments was taking part in her first Hackathon at Grindr where her team took home 1st place!

Check out Marielle’s Grindr story below, and take a look at our careers page to learn more about our open job opportunities.

Have you always worked in Product Management for Tech Companies? What drew you to the role or the dating space specifically?

There was a very special and endearing project I was working on at my previous employer and being part of that mobile app prototype sparked my interest in Product Management. I was passionate about the difference this prototype could have in someone’s life and the impact it would have on users.

I also loved the ability to collaborate cross-functionally to deliver a product that started as just an idea. While I wasn’t too familiar with the Product Manager role, I inadvertently was performing that work and when the opportunity to try this at Grindr presented itself, it felt right.

Tell us why you joined Grindr. What do you love most about our mission and our culture?

Initially, I was not familiar with the app; it wasn’t even installed on my phone. So when I downloaded it and created my account, I thought, “What am I doing?” I was new to the dating space but as I spoke to more folks on the Anti-Abuse team, I began to understand and feel very strongly about the work and the efforts of the team and what it means for our users and the queer community. Supporting the LGBTQIA+ community in building connections in a safe and secure space is work worth doing and I needed to be a part of it.

Also, the employees at Grindr truly make the culture here. Being around so many passionate, collaborative, and innovative colleagues motivates me to continue to do the work that I do. People work at Grindr for more than just a paycheck and you can really feel that.

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Tell us a little bit more about your role as a Product Manager for Anti-Abuse. What is the function to Grindr and how does it support users?

Anti-Abuse has many facets and dimensions. Our work is mostly done behind the scenes and doesn’t always directly interface with the users. As a Product Manager, I am part of the integrations with systems and services that eliminate and reduce spam on our platform.

Those efforts also expand out to other bad actors and behaviors that users should not experience. Our efforts are to provide users with safety and security when using the app and engaging with the community in a trusted way. Oftentimes, when people think of spam on our app, they tend to categorize everything under the same umbrella. But there are many dimensions to the work that Anti-Abuse is doing. Beyond preventing scams, we are leaning in with the moderation team to proactively identify bullying, abuse, and activity that should not be happening on the app. There is a real human on the other side of the phone and we want to make sure that our users' safety is top priority in every interaction.

What interesting problems is your Grindr team solving for and what are you looking forward to for the future?

One of the most fascinating challenges working in Anti-Abuse is the evolution of spam and the negative use of social media apps. Our efforts to detect patterns and aid our moderation team is one of the biggest challenges we’re focused on solving. We aim to build new and unique features that build trust with our users and allow them to be their authentic selves.

While spam and bad actors are never a good thing for our users, they present interesting challenges for our team to solve. Not only do we have to work with the engineering and CX teams on developing strategies to counteract abuse, but also to mitigate it proactively as technology evolves.

What are your goals for Grindr’s Anti-Abuse team as you continue to grow and scale the team?

Anti-Abuse’s goals are ongoing and focus on making the user’s experience safe and positive, helping them find genuine and meaningful connections. To do this we are partnering with the engineering and moderation teams on implementing more solutions that identify bad actors earlier and more often. We consistently go through user-reported data and flags to make sure that we are addressing concerns while simultaneously being conscious of an inclusive moderation process. The goal is to make sure that we get bad actors off the app and keep Grindr a fun, engaging, and safe experience for everyone.

Beyond that, Grindr is a very collaborative company and as we grow and new product features are rolled out, we will continue to partner with other teams to keep our users' safety and security at the forefront of the work that we do. Our vision is a world where all queer people belong; empowered to connect, love, live joyfully, and build authentic community. To that end, we need to bring in talent that understands the importance of our users’ safety and is passionate about supporting the global queer community.

If you are interested in working with creative and passionate people like Marielle on user safety and security, you should check out our open Product Director, Anti-Abuse role!

Check out our careers page for a full list of open positions at Grindr.

Love has always been complicated, especially for the queer community. On top of the inherent challenges of being queer in a straight world, the COVID-19 pandemic has added some new hurdles to the sex & dating landscape, cutting us off from one another and from our hard-earned traditions and safe spaces. Nevertheless, the queer community has done what it’s always done when faced with a challenge: adapted, evolved, and grown stronger.

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, we asked 10,000 Grindr users in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Mexico and India about how their behaviors and expectations have changed since the pandemic’s onset and found that, despite all the loneliness of a year spent in isolation, romance isn’t dead. In fact, the opposite might be true. The Grindr community appears to be using this time to dig deeper into their core values: what they want from a partner, what their comfort zone looks like in a changed world, and how to stay healthy—physically, sexually, and emotionally.

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Head over to www.grindr.com/covid for the full report, as well as our COVID sex & dating safety guidelines created in partnership with Building Health Online Communities (BHOC). If you’re not meeting up this Valentine’s Day, you’re not alone. If you are, you owe it to yourself and your community to heed expert-recommended ways to minimize risk. Either way, we’re here to help you stay informed, stay safe, and stay connected.

Are Grindr users subjected to Automated Decision Making (ADM)? What does that even mean? Automated decision-making is the process of making a decision by automated means without human involvement. For example, an app or service might make a recommendation to a user, or personalize a feature based on an algorithm (data + math) instead of a human decision. Sometimes, these can be quite simple, like "people who like this often also like that.” Other times, they are more complex. The privacy world is recently in a flurry with news about ADM systems, which are sometimes lumped together with more advanced systems that embrace AI (Artificial Intelligence), and questions around how apps like ours use them.  

Many proposed state privacy laws in the US are now engaging on this topic, and a few weeks ago the EU Commission released a 120+ page document covering their proposed rules for Artificial Intelligence which they believe provide “[p]roportionate and flexible rules [that] will address the specific risks posed by AI systems and set the highest standard worldwide.” The rules focus primarily on high-risk AI systems that could have a significant impact on a person’s real-world movements and opportunities (employment, law enforcement, border control, etc.).  

There are some powerful AI systems that are on the horizon. Self-driving cars that have to make very fast decisions based on what they can see or sense are an example. IBM's Watson famously beat champions in Jeopardy and Chess. And AI systems are getting more powerful, quickly. But for some time, most every service you use will not be using the AI of science fiction but more AI “lite.”

For EU users, Article 22 of the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) states, “The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.” I really like the UK ICO’s approach to this part of the GDPR by providing a detailed check-list to walk through the responsibilities as a company with respect to ADM.

Does this matter to Grindr and our users? Today, it largely doesn’t impact our users as we don’t engage in ADM outside of our security systems—definitely not to the point of affecting a user’s legal status or their legal rights, i.e., “producing a legal effect.” In the Grindr Privacy Policy we call out the following use of collected personal information:  “For Automated Decision Making - for example, to detect and remove spammers, detect and remove non-compliant images, etc. through artificial intelligence.”  

As described, we have automated security systems that try to identify those attempting to create spam accounts and block them, and our systems identify and remediate accounts that are breaking our community guidelines. As with any automated system, we do get some false negatives which lets some of the bad stuff through. We are grateful for our ever-vigilant users to help report those accounts. Sadly, there is also the chance for false positives, meaning someone who didn’t do something wrong is flagged as someone who did. Finding the balance between the two is difficult and complex. We continually fine-tune our systems to navigate this ever-evolving challenge. Rest assured, we give those users who fall into the “false positive” bucket a direct line to our Customer Experience team who can remedy the situation quickly if our systems made an error.

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I recently shared with Tom Quisel, our Chief Technology Officer, that many people think Grindr’s systems are more sophisticated than they really are. I appreciate that his teams deal with a ton of complexity, but how much of what we do at Grindr today reaches the bar of Automated Decision Making or Artificial Intelligence?

Tom shared this with us:

“The lines between Automated Decision Making (ADM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are blurry. Part of the confusion arises because AI is used as a catch-all term to refer to different concepts. AI can refer to the simulation of human intelligence, to computers that are capable of problem solving, to specific skills such as speech recognition or computer vision, or to computerized agents that perceive their environment in some way and attempt to achieve a goal, just to name a few. AI is sometimes conflated with Machine Learning (ML), the science of inferring rules from data without direct human involvement. AI can be as simple as a common thermostat: a device that perceives its environment by measuring the temperature and decides to turn the heat on or off to achieve its goal of holding a particular temperature. Many factors need to be considered when assessing the ethical implications of an ADM system. Among others, there's the complexity of a system, how it is used, how it can be overridden, the data used to create the system, any biases, alternative options, and the intentions behind it.

To focus on Grindr, our app provides a straightforward set of features that allows users to search for and chat with other nearby users who've used the app recently. The app puts the power to search, view, filter, and block in the hands of our users. When a user searches for others nearby, Grindr displays those who were online recently and applies the searching user's filters (such as age, tribe, relationship status, etc...), sorted by distance. Sometimes a little randomness is thrown in to keep results fresh. That's it. There's no recommendation algorithm to speak of on Grindr today. Grindr gets out of the way, and lets our users drive their own experience.”

While Grindr doesn’t leverage AI or ADM outside of security systems today, we do endeavor to make “smarter” product features in the near future (better cascade results, recommended tags for searches, etc.). As we explore ADM and AI for Grindr features,  our ongoing privacy commitment to our users includes transparency, and where appropriate, we’ll provide controls to our users to turn off or provide input to help finetune the automated systems.

-Shane Wiley, Chief Privacy Officer | LinkedIn

As of last week, Grindr has a new set of Community Guidelines. For the most part, our rules are the same as they always have been, though we include more detail and transparency. However, there is one pretty big difference: we now allow you to post a photo of yourself in your underwear on your Grindr profile.

Why did we do this? As the new Senior Director of Customer Experience at Grindr, it’s my job to make sure that our user’s experience is a great one. In digging into our data, I saw that 25% of photos uploaded on Grindr were being rejected and over half of those were being rejected for being too sexual.

While our photo policies are largely governed by the app store rules from Apple (see App Store Review Guidelines 1.1.14) and Google (see Google Play Store Developer Program Policy on “Sexual Content and Profanity”) around indecency, Grindr is known for being a sex-positive app. Our marketing materials can be sexy, our users like to talk about sex and use Grindr to hook up, and we can all agree there should be no shame in that. It’s clear that many of our users expect to be able to upload sexy photos and have them approved, and so there were real feelings of frustration and confusion when that didn’t happen.

Here’s a public app review of ours:

Sad FB and Instagram aren't as strict with their policies as you are. I can't even upload a pic with just above the waist because I may be naked! It's BS and even underwear?!?! Come on, FB and Instagram allow that.

Even worse, I was also seeing feedback that enforcement of the photo rules felt arbitrary. People were noticing that their photo was rejected, but would see someone else’s similar photo approved. At best, this was frustrating, and at worst, it was being attributed to racism, body shaming, transphobia, or other types of bias from Grindr and Grindr moderators.

Here’s another public app review:

The most prejudiced dating app I've been on. Every time I make a profile with a shirtless pic my pix are constantly deleted because they are inappropriate, but there are countless guys of other ethnicities in their underwear and shirtless in their profiles. Just doesn't add up to me.

I want to be perfectly clear on this point: at Grindr, we are committed to diversity and inclusion in every way, and this extends to our moderation policies and training. We actively work to make our policy easy to understand and enforce objectively. Reviews like this that assume bias and ill-intent were a call to action—something had to change.

So what was actually causing this issue? The answer is simple, but mundane. In content moderation, there are a lot of grey areas and judgement calls. Not every photo will neatly fit into a rule, and so you create more rules and guidance for moderators so that they know what to do. Unfortunately, it’s easy to back yourself into a corner with this, and before you know it, you have incredibly detailed micro-rules for your internal team that are not at all intuitive or apparent to your users. You don’t see the forest for the trees.

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As a concrete example, we allowed photos of swimwear while outside, but not photos of underwear inside. On one hand, this seems logical. Swimwear is appropriate in a public context, while underwear is more private. However, it doesn’t easily hold up. What if someone has two photos, one of them wearing swim trunks inside, and one outside. The photos show exactly the same amount of skin, and neither are sexually provocative. Do we allow both? Neither? Just one? What if there are two photos, and the one with swimwear outside is actually more revealing than the one of underwear inside?

By trying to create clarity, the end result was actually a set of rules that wasn’t intuitive anymore, so our users were assuming we were biased in our decision making. Once we identified that there was an issue here, we set about figuring out how to make a change that would seem intuitive and make sense to our users. We did some user research and talked to real users of our app. We looked at data about photo uploads and rejections. We talked to employees about what expectations we had internally. And then we rewrote the rules.

Now we allow almost all photos of people in their underwear (and yes, in towels). As we outline in our Community Guidelines, there are some basic decency expectations which apply to all photos, not just ones with underwear, like: no erections, no nudity, no sex acts, no pornographic poses, no extreme closeups of erogenous zones. This applies to all types of clothing, all gender presentations, and all situations indoor and outdoor. The spirit of the rule is clear, and the guidelines are more simple.

The outcome of this change is that we cut photo rejections in half, without any increase in flags for nudity or pornography from our users. That’s a big success, and I hope that by continuing to increase education about our rules and guidelines, we continue to close that gap further. There will always be some nuances and grey areas in our guidelines that require us to make a judgement call, but hopefully now we are more aligned with you—our users and our community.

That said, there is still work to be done. In addition to human moderation, we do use some automated machine learning systems, and mistakes are possible with both systems. You may see a photo on Grindr that got approved and shouldn’t have been. If this is the case, please flag it for us so we can take it down. We are also constantly improving our training materials for the moderation team, and are working hard to include more examples of different ethnicities, body types, and gender presentations. We are also working on creating specific anti-bias training for the moderation team.

Finally, there’s more that we can do about better communicating our guidelines, philosophies, and moderation practices with our community. We hope to continue to be more transparent and to earn your trust and confidence in our systems. Please keep an eye out for more updates from us in the future, and in the meantime, enjoy those underwear photos!

-Alice Hunsberger, Sr. Director of Customer Experience | LinkedIn

This weekend, in the aftermath of President Trump getting blocked on both Facebook and Twitter, the #grindr hashtag was trending due to several well-timed parody posts about both Trump and Lindsey Graham getting banned from Grindr.

While they were hilarious, we think this is a good time to set the record straight (no pun intended) about Grindr’s policies when it comes to politics and banning.

First, we’re not aware of either Trump or Graham having a Grindr profile. If they do, it’s surely on the down-low.

Second, our Community Guidelines state that we want you to be yourself and express yourself freely on Grindr, but not at the expense of someone else. We welcome free speech, and recognize that political preferences can be critical to finding a compatible match. For this reason, we don’t ban on political affiliation alone. Our users are free to say that they are conservative Republicans or Trump supporters if they like, just as they are free to say that they are liberal Democrats.

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However, white supremacists and violent insurrectionists are not welcome on Grindr. That goes beyond politics as usual. Grindr has no tolerance for hate speech or violence of any kind, and will permanently ban any user that is found to be engaging in or encouraging that kind of behavior, politician or not. So if Trump or Graham do want to create Grindr accounts, they better be on their best behavior.

-Alice Hunsberger, Sr. Director, Customer Experience | LinkedIn

‍Meet Liang Guan (she/her), our Revenue Operations Manager!

Liang has been with Grindr for over three years and has worked in revenue operations and data analytics since 2015. Her team at Grindr is in charge of programmatic advertising operations and revenue data analytics, helping to provide insights to leadership about how ad programming is impacting the business. This has the dual benefit of not only generating more revenue for the company but also continuously improving the user experience.

Check out Liang’s Grindr story below, and take a look at our careers page to learn more about our open revenue operations job opportunities.

What sparked your interest in data?

Coming from a finance background, I always knew I was enthusiastic about numbers and their stories. During my tenure in investment banking, I learned how to extract business insights from reading data and conveying those insights to stakeholders. I enjoyed impacting business decisions through my analytical work and data storytelling.

I was further introduced to data science techniques that impact finance while pursuing my MBA (yes, that means lots of excel!). Revenue operations at Grindr is my dream job; it encompasses those data techniques with immediate business impacts and important monetization decisions that directly impact our users.  

What drew you to tech or dating space specifically?

Even before working in the dating space, I was interested in understanding user behavior, the psychology that drives user choices in dating, and the idea of helping people find better matches. Being in the "business of love," I couldn't imagine any other field that leverages technology more interestingly. Every day I help people connect and reach each other in new and impactful ways.

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Tell us why you joined Grindr. What do you love most about our mission and our culture?

Joining Grindr was an easy decision for me. When I heard about the opportunity to serve the LGBTQIA+ community, I jumped on board! After working at Grindr for over three years, I am still confident that joining the company was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Supporting the community and working with passionate and driven coworkers inspires me to do my best work every day.

What interesting problems is your Grindr team solving for and what are you looking forward to for the future?

As our user base grows, we are focused on gaining deeper insights into how users connect and interact to better facilitate meaningful connections for the community. Grindr’s mission is to connect people in the LGBTQIA+ community, and revenue operations focus on empowering Grindr’s product development and business teams to support our mission.

For example, last year Grindr expanded the quantity of “nearby” user views from 100 profiles to 600, so free users could view more profiles and broaden their reach across the community. Our team was involved in that significant product change from the very beginning. We leveraged predictive analytics and developed advanced A/B testing to transform the experience and improve operational efficiency. Volunteered data enabled us to understand what the users needed and to transform it into product decisions. As a result, the “More Profiles” launch achieved a 30% improvement in conversion from a user experience optimization perspective.

What are your goals for growing your team?

The revenue operations team focuses on gaining self-volunteered knowledge from users about their behavior, processing large amounts of information efficiently, and helping to drive business decisions to improve the app. We aim to build a team that can quickly respond to Grindr's fast-growing product needs and broadens our understanding of our users and their needs. If you are passionate about helping the community, love turning data into actionable business insights, and want to help our leaders make informed decisions, please apply to join our team!

At Grindr, you not only get to work on creating a best-in-class experience for the LGBTQ+ community, but you also work for a company where creativity and innovation flourish. Ideas that you develop have a real impact for users of the largest LGBTQ+ dating app in the market. Recently, Grindr hosted our annual Hackathon (AKA HackDay, Datathon, or Codefest) which brought together teams throughout the organization in the spirit of collaboration and innovation as they set out to solve challenges, introduce new ideas, and reimagine what Grindr is capable of in support of the LGBTQ+ community.

We sat down with some folks involved in the Hackathon and here is what they had to say about the impact of the event:

Alice Hunsberger, Senior Director & Global Head of Customer Experience, judged our “For Love” category, which centered on ideas around user safety, health, accessibility, or connection. We asked Alice to explain hackathons and what was the goal for them. Here is how she thinks about it:

“If you haven’t worked for a tech company before then you may be confused! During a hackathon, teams have to come up with a technical idea for their company and then build it as best they can, over a day or a long weekend. It’s called a “hackathon” because developers will just hack together code super-fast to build the thing, but not everything has to be code-based. The goal is to generate innovative ideas for the company, encourage cross-functional teamwork, and just have fun.”

At Grindr, the safety and security of the community we serve is always top-of-mind in the work we do, and this Hackathon reflects that same ethos. Teams competed in two categories: The first centered around business growth and impact while the second category focused on ideas that improved user safety, health, accessibility, or connection. All of the presentations showcased exceptional ideas around ways that Grindr can continue to support the global LQBTQ+ community.

Jack Harrison-Quintana, Director of Grindr for Equality, also served as one of the judges for the Hackathon and provided deeper insight into what makes Hackathons so impactful for companies:

“One of the things that I love about Hackathons is that it creates a space where people’s creativity is not restricted by existing priorities. It allows teams to incubate and build on ideas that could potentially go on to become future features of the actual app. I have been able to judge Hackathon presentations where we have gone on to implement all or parts of a project that were presented or even sparked ideas that we were not even considering yet.”

It is truly rewarding to work for a place that allows people to innovate in their fields while uplifting the queer community. This year’s Hackathon showcased the collaborative spirit of Grindr’s employees and their diverse talents. If you are looking for a culture that allows you to work at the intersection of technology and supporting the LGBTQ+ community, consider applying for a role with Grindr here. Hope to see you at the next Hackathon!

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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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Now you might be thinking, “Grindr already had tags,” and you’re right—we did. But while those tags were an easy way to self-identify and express yourself on your profile, they weren’t searchable, and so they weren’t a great way to find other people into the same things as you.

My Tags, on the other hand, exist to help you express yourself and to help you find others who share your interests. So if you’re into cuddling—or carplay, or cruising—you can now quickly and easily search for and find others who are into those things too.

Here’s how it works:

To add tags just navigate to your profile, click “Edit Profile,” and select up to 8 tags from the My Tags section. Once you’ve added tags, you can click on a tag on your profile or another user’s profile to bring up a search of users near you who’ve also added that tag.

You can also search for tags by clicking on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the main grid. This will open a new page where you can search for tags either by typing them in or by tapping on a word that appears in your search suggestions. Either way, you can pull up a selection of nearby profiles that have added the tag you’re searching for.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Even though we’ll show you the closest people to your location when you search a tag, it’s possible that they could still be pretty far away depending on how densely populated your area is and how popular the tag is.
• We plan to add more tags in the near future, and are excited to hear what additional tags would resonate with our community. If you’re not seeing a tag you’d like added, just tap “Suggest a Tag” and let us know what you’d like to see.
• Lastly, the more people add tags to their profiles, the more useful searching for tags becomes—so go add some My Tags to your profile!

My Tags was born out of a desire to help our users find one another via shared interests—kinks, hobbies, personality and more—because it’s so much easier to start a conversation when you already know you’re into the same things as a potential connection. Stay tuned as we add new tags to the library and continue to roll out My Tags to additional countries and languages in the coming weeks.

-Bronwyn Lundberg, Associate Product Manager | LinkedIn

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At Grindr, the security and safety of our users and products is a top priority. As reported in many places, there are multiple large scale vulnerabilities across the internet that surfaced from a software library called Log4j. In December, when this issue was disclosed by the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, we quickly activated our incident response teams and processes to assess the impact of this vulnerability on our products and customers.

Our initial assessment has found minimal usage of the affected log4j library. The small usage that was found has been reviewed by our team and successfully patched. At this time we have found no evidence of exploitation of this vulnerability observed within Grindr's environment.

Our threat mitigation team will continue to stay vigilant in monitoring this vulnerability, and as always will continue to keep the safety and security of our users at the forefront of our efforts.

-Joel Keating, Chief Information Security Officer | LinkedIn

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‍Meet Amy Lashley (she/her), a Sr. Software Engineer, Backend working with Grindr since February 2022!

Amy came to Grindr from the college advancement industry where she worked on building relationships of a slightly different variety. She is currently a part of the revenue squad at Grindr where she collaborates with other engineers and product managers to find ways to add value to our current and future features in the Grindr mobile app. Beyond work, Amy enjoys filling her free time with renovating and researching the history of her early 1800s house with her wife and performing in a local guitar orchestra!

Check out Amy’s Grindr story below, and take a look at our careers page to learn more about our open job opportunities.

Have you always worked in the software industry?

Yes and no! And both at the same time, sometimes. I graduated with a B.S. in computer science in 2003 and spent the next few years doing programming in the advertising industry - Java web applications, PHP, and even some ActionScript (RIP Adobe Flash Player). I went back to school and earned a B.A. in Music while also opening a small music lesson studio in Atlanta Georgia. For almost 10 years, I worked simultaneously as a freelance web developer, small business owner, and musician. Those years were very busy, but also so fulfilling on many levels.

When I decided to return to full-time work in the tech industry, I was looking for a place where my work still felt meaningful and impactful. That is one reason that working here at Grindr is such a great fit. Not only do I get to flex my technical skills, but the work that I do directly impacts a community that I feel passionately about serving.

Tell us why you joined Grindr. What do you love most about our mission and our culture?

When I started looking for new job opportunities, I knew that I wanted to work for a mission-driven company whose values aligned with my own. Once I started researching Grindr and reading blog posts on Grindr for Equality, as well as some of the technology challenges the company was tackling, I was all in. I was really struck by the work that goes into providing safety and connection for the queer community worldwide, and I wanted to be a part of that.

Grindr is part of the framework that connects the global LGBTQ community and they take that place amongst the community very thoughtfully. It is inspiring to work with passionate, fun, and collaborative professionals who are experts in their field and really care about the work that they are doing. From a technology perspective, the work here at Grindr is both interesting and challenging. From a culture perspective, it is such a relief to know that you can come to work daily as your authentic self.

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How have you grown professionally while on our team?

Working in Kotlin and learning to solve issues at the scale we have here at Grindr were two of the main reasons I was excited about this job from a technical perspective. And in the short time I’ve been here, I have had plenty of opportunities to hone those skills. I had never used Kotlin before, so learning a new language has been fun. The way that our teams are structured gives a lot of room to collaborate and learn from each other. Our syncs are almost always comprised of developers from different backgrounds. There is so much varying expertise on the team and a humble approach to collaboration, it makes it easy to take on new challenges knowing that you have a great group of people to reach out to if you run into any roadblocks.

I’m also grateful for the professional development opportunities that Grindr provides. This year a small group of us are attending the AWS reInvent conference. This will be such a great learning opportunity and I am so glad to work for an employer that is supportive of my growth.  

What interesting problems is your Grindr team solving for and what are you looking forward to for the future?

One of the more interesting projects that my team is tackling, is improving the Boost feature which was launched earlier this year. We’re currently working on algorithms that make the Boost experience more meaningful to both the boosted user and the other users who see them in their grid. Implementing these algorithms, and using some of the more advanced ElasticSearch features has stretched my knowledge and usage of the tool. It has been fun to collaborate with the product and engineering teams while getting to learn and become a better engineer myself. I look forward to seeing the impact this project has on both the user experience and the company.

The inspiring thing about Grindr is that they really do care about making the app a better experience for the user. A lot of companies will look at revenue teams with just the lens of how to make more money. But Grindr really wants to ensure that the features we produce add value for the people using them. We are constantly evaluating, testing, and iterating features to make them stronger. I look forward to seeing how that work continues to make the app better for the global LGBTQ community.

Do you have a favorite memory of working at Grindr so far or a moment that stands out to you that really captures what it is like to work here?

Grindr is a remote-first company and while some teams meet somewhat regularly in person, it is rare for the whole company to be able to get together. That all changed at the end of June 2022 when we had a company-wide retreat at our headquarters in West Hollywood, CA. That entire week was amazing - I got to meet folks from all over the company, some of whom I don't always get to chat with every day. We had engaging talks and sessions throughout the day and I finally got to see some of those legendary company parties that more tenured folks talked about. I left the retreat with even more excitement and passion for the organization and our culture, as well as some new work friends. Being able to connect with coworkers in person cannot be beaten and I will cherish that memory!

I also always look forward to our weekly All-Hands meetings. We have a tradition of our weekly 5-star winner (equivalent to the employee of the week) picking the soundtrack that intros the following meeting. It's fun to hear new and familiar tunes jamming at the start of the call. We also have a semi-regular DJ hour where anyone can volunteer to DJ on Slack-  it’s a lively co-working time and the chance to bond with folks over music.

If you are interested in working with collaborative and insightful engineers like Amy at a company that is mission driven and fun to be a part of, you should consider applying for open roles today!