Gay therapist Matt Dempsey is here to whip your isolation-twisted mind into shape.

As we head into the 3rd, 5th, 8th, whatever week of this pandemic, we thought it wise to take a deep breath and do a serious mental check-in. How are you taking care of yourself during isolation?

We asked our quarantine coach Matt Dempsey to share a few mental health tips with us, and boy did he ever. Watch the video to find out how self-isolation can trigger a funhouse mirror effect, and learn techniques for combating anxieties, insecurities, and vulnerabilities during this unprecedented time.

‍ADVICEBLOOP

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Miley Cyrus: Plastic Hearts

Pop, Trap, and Country Miley are long gone. Please welcome to the stage, Punk Miley.

BY: NICK LEVINE

From hyper-wholesome Hannah Montana to the sex-positive Bangerz era, Miley Cyrus has made it clear she’s a pop star who can’t be tamed or put in a box. New album Plastic Hearts sees her really lean into ‘80s-style arena rock: if you bought a pair of fingerless gloves during your emo phase, you’ll want to dig them out again. Here’s our track-by-track review.

WTF DO I KNOW

This savage opener tells us two things we really need to know about Plastic Hearts.

First: Miley is serving us '80s rock queen complete with guitar solos where necessary.

Second: this is a defiant break-up album that offers tantalizing hints about one or several of her relationships. "Wakin' up with people that we met for the first time," she sings here. "Loved it, then I hated it, and I let you go." Ouch.

PLastic Hearts

The catchy title track finds Miley confronting her demons over a bouncy new wave beat. There's a namecheck for "the Chateau" – L.A.'s Chateau Marmont, obviously – and a probable dig at the city generally, which she describes as "the sunny place for shady people." Still, this song is mostly about Miley's own mental state. 'Frightened by my own reflection, desperate for a new connection," she sings. "Pull you in, but don't you get too close." Babes, we've all been there.

Angels like you

We've known Miley can sell a ballad since "The Climb." This one's a big, swelling number on which she takes the blame for a toxic relationship. "It's not your fault I ruin everything, and it's not your fault I can't be what you need," she sings in her gutsiest voice. One to listen to in the bath with a large glass of Pinot noir.

Prisoner feat. Dua lipa

The album's evocative second single takes us right back to 1982 – Miley and Dua come off like old friends doing shots in a dive bar while complaining about their shitty relationships. To add to the '80s flavor, the melody even interpolates Olivia Newton-John's iconic club hit "Physical." It sounds slight on first listen, but “Prisoner” is a true grower.

Gimme what I want

A seriously hot stomper about craving a one-night-stand – perhaps one with a kink element. "Pleasure leads to pain / To me, they're both the same," Miley sings on the first verse. Either way, she's going to make sure she gets off. "I just need a lover, so gimme what I want or I'll give it to myself," she commands on the chorus.

Night Crawling feat. Billy idol

Look, if someone had asked you at the start of the year, "Do you want a Miley Cyrus and Billy Idol duet?," you'd have said no. But in 2020, all bets are off, and "Night Crawling" fully slaps. It sounds like the theme song to a post-Blade Runner sci-fi movie – all dry ice and attitude – and the chorus is enormous. It’s the sort of song that only Miley could pull off.  

Midnight Sky

You know this one; it's a song of the year. After five or six plays, "Midnight Sky" will make you want to listen to Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen," but Miley knows this, which is why you'll find a remix/mash-up on the album’s digital edition. As you'd expect, Miley and Stevie’s equally throaty vocals blend magically.

high

Miley explored country-pop on 2017’s Younger Now, but “High” feels properly gutsy and lovelorn where that album was a touch restrained. Lyrically, it deals with messy post-breakup feelings in an all-too-relatable way. "And I don't miss you," she sings on the chorus, "But I think of you and don't know why." Eugh. Do yourself a favor, Miley, and mute their stories.

hate me

Miley gets existential on a midtempo track which has echoes of her experimental post-Bangerz release, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. It's not as weird and wonderful as that album, but there's a definite comedown vibe here. "I wonder what would happen if I die, I hope all of my friends get drunk and high," she ponders with more than a hint of melancholy.

Bad karma feat. Joan jett

Miley and the legendary Joan Jett go way back. When she inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, Miley described the Runaways star as "superwoman" and began her speech by recalling "the first time I wanted to have sex with Joan Jett." Thankfully, this slinky collab captures the two women's chemistry. When Miley sings, "I've always picked a giver 'cause I've always been the taker," it's up to us to interpret the line however sub – sorry, suggestively – we like.

never be me

Miley moves into '80s movie ballad territory with this wistful and candid slowie. "But if you're looking for stable, that'll never be me," she sings. "If you're looking for faithful, that'll never be me." Future partners can't say they haven't been warned.

Golden g string

An unusual title for an unusual song. The reflective album closer sees Miley ruminate on her own notoriety – "at least it gives the paper somethin' they can write about" – and the cruel brutality of the Trump era. "You dare to call me crazy, have you looked around this place?" she sings on the chorus. Frankly, it's quite a lot of ground to cover on one song, but Miley's unselfconscious sincerity helps her pull it off.

‍ENTERTAINMENTBLOOPREVIEW

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Total Bottom, Apologies to Mom

It’s these expectations of power.
Man of the house
should something nasty befall Daddy
without Mom nearby to steer
towards sensibility, away
from curious mountain lions,
or gas station fist fights.
I shouldn’t apologize
because I carried the firewood. Emptied
our trash when full of veggie skins.
But I can just hear her sighing
when her one strong boy opens up
about being jack hammered nightly.
She could be disappointed,
or maybe she would love to know her son
thrives from underneath, same as she.

Students on Grindr

reach out, ask if I’m teaching next year
because my hands-on style was easy to digest
in previous meet-ups. I have to ask
who I’m speaking to. Send a pic.
Sometimes this means boring
polo shirts and sandals,
bare calves. If the student confesses
they’ve been drinking and the club has let out,
there might be a chance of skin.
Sorry, professor, wrong photo lol.
I do enjoy their signs of life.
Dog food bowls at their heels, litter boxes
at bedside. I feel like I know them beyond semesters
when I peek at their list of kinks,
just above preferred pronouns. I can’t forget
Todd, who plagiarized Elizabeth Bishop—bondage,
light. Roberto, middle row and very introverted?
Vocal dom, but also
knots, bareback. Who wrote an A paper
on TV’s Dance Moms. Of course I’m teaching
next year, I say, then close down
the conversation. Now they know
I’m into fem, non-aggressive types. But my profile
will remain as is, especially that picture
with a Coke bottle between my legs.
Eager minds want to know,
but they shouldn’t learn from me.
I suppose if they ask, I might have to tell them
my secret—I’m a better teacher the morning after
I’ve learned from someone else.

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Public Safety

From this window I see boys trying to get laid.
They don’t care who knows,
all walking, just smiling. When quiet
they are trying

to get laid. I could move among them
with my faux straight walk, my voice low
enough to meet the bare minimum

of masculine American standards.
Only I’m counting every year

I was afraid to find boys my age
of the same tongue
and navigational pull at churches, outside gas stations

—I heard about boys who realized their language

only to lose their tongues, eviscerated with arms
around and chained to a fencepost

like youth to temptation. Boys out for shelter
stolen away by short breaths
promising L-O-V-E. I lost years.

Four fingers in the back pocket
and a thumb that won’t fit. Close whispers.
Just a goddamn kiss on the neck.

All those small town bodies
ready for a how-to tucked away,
folded into man-made graves.

Busted like teeth. Boys like playthings.

Boys like death.
When trying to get laid
one teenage boy should not say to another
that there is this place downtown

where we can stand in an ocean
of heavy foot traffic, playfully wrestle and tug
our limbs like any straight couple
blocking the sidewalk.  

Know the difference between a social kiss
and one held back
to keep a grocery run,
yogurt for two, without incident.

Dare to go further

in public, and some men
do not care to see
others trying to get laid.

Or taking hands. Buying dinner at the local.
Or simply saying, I want you.

Then I hear someone say
this is a new year. Whatever a man does,

but in private. What two men can do
when their stomachs rumble
until their idiot hearts reach out for peace.

Someone say it again. Continue as boys will,
and stop shaking . This is a new year.

Ship

I know your face is a beacon, carefree moon
with tongue performing a raspberry
I will climb for, sail or swim.
Though I am afraid of heights
and the deepness of water.

Maybe I’ll just look at you from here,
stick my tongue out until it meets yours in passing.

‍ENTERTAINMENTPatrick Rogers POETRY

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left the already vulnerable Ukrainian LGBTQ+ community in an even worse situation. Like the rest of the world, we at Grindr have been thinking about what we could do. Here’s what we’ve done so far.

Our Employees

‍The news of this crisis underscored the need to get more financial resources to the LGBTQ+ community in Ukraine. Grindr made an immediate financial contribution to OutRight Action International’s Ukrainian Emergency Fund, which is making grants to Ukrainian LGBTQ organizations as well as to organizations in other parts of Europe that are helping displaced Ukrainian queers.

For Ukrainian Grindr users

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‍We are making our safety-related information optimally accessible to Grindr users logging in from Ukraine, to demonstrate our care. We have also translated our safety guide and safety messaging into Ukrainian and shifted the text in such a way that lets folks know we stand with them.

For Grindr users world-wide

‍We knew Grindr users outside Ukraine would want to join in providing life-saving support, so we publicized a fundraiser for OutRight Action International’s Ukrainian Emergency Fund to the global Grindr user base, giving them an opportunity to get involved.

While we are deeply troubled by Russia’s actions toward Ukraine, we are also warmed by the outpouring of generosity and care from our users for the Ukraine LGBTQ+ community. Grindr stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian people in this time of crisis, and we add our voice to the chorus calling for a swift end to this military aggression. We will continue to look for ways to support those in need.  

‍Meet Tyler Watson (he/him), Staff Data Scientist with Grindr!

Tyler’s background is in international development and retail. Tyler made the career shift into data science five years ago after a bit of self-study and an immersive data science program. While this may be an uncommon career path for political science undergrads, in Tyler’s own words, “I like to tell people I traded one of the sciences for another - nobody has ever laughed at that, but it’s too early to say those samples represent the overall population.”

Learn more about what brought Tyler to Grindr below and check out our careers page to stay up-to-date on open roles!

What drew you to the dating space?

I hadn’t worked in the dating space before starting with Grindr in 2021! My previous job as a data scientist was focused on using machine learning (ML) to reduce costs at a large retailer. This was full of interesting challenges, but I felt disconnected from our customers and had a feeling the people working on personalization, recommender systems, and other models that customers interacted with directly were having more fun.

It’s in my nature to spend time wondering why people behave the way they do in a given situation. I find it interesting to think about the differences between what people say they want and what they demonstrate they actually want, and how people signal things they want to communicate but might not want to say outright…it was inevitable that I would eventually start working on user-facing data science projects.

Social apps, and dating apps in particular, are huge messy ecosystems where noticing patterns in behavior is extremely rewarding since it ultimately helps you understand people better.  

What was your career path to the software industry?

I started my career as an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea because I was scared to start a desk job right out of college. This was an incredible two-year experience that had a major impact on my personality and how I view the world. One of the most important things I learned was that I wasn’t cut out to teach young kids because I couldn’t help laughing when they misbehaved.

I initially wanted to join the Foreign Service when I moved back, but the US State Department was less interested in that than I was. Fortunately, I was able to find a role in international development consulting (a fairly niche field that only really exists around government agencies that fund foreign aid projects). I spent several years working in project management and business development, which involved international travel to places not often visited by tourists. I was also in meetings with experienced foreign officials and non-profit leaders that had life experiences completely different from mine. I like to think this taught me to look for common ground with people I meet.

I started to get frustrated with the way we made decisions though - our approach was often to just ask the person who had spent the most time in the relevant country what they thought we should do. This was what really pushed me to start looking into data analytics, and then data science. Eventually, I learned enough about data science to know I wanted to dive in and make a full career change - I’ve been working in software ever since.

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

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The most rewarding part of working in international development for me was seeing the positive impact our work had on people’s lives. Whether it was increasing access to education, training farmers to be more efficient, or helping small businesses bring their products to market, the work I did ultimately helped improve livelihoods and increased the amount of joy in the world, which was a key driver in my decision to join Grindr.

The opportunity to do challenging and exciting data science work while also facilitating human connection, helping underserved communities, and increasing the amount of joy in the world was what attracted me to Grindr. It's fulfilling to know that if I do my job well, people are more likely to find love, friendship, and sex - whichever of those they need in their life.

How have you grown professionally while on our team?

Working at Grindr has given me ample opportunities to develop my skills and grow my expertise. In my previous role, the scope of my work usually started with data engineers giving me access to the stakeholder team’s data and ended with me delivering a model to ML engineers who would integrate it into that team’s systems. At Grindr, data scientists move much faster and work in areas that may be considered data science, data engineering, product analytics, and machine learning engineering. Developing a wider range of skills has been challenging and rewarding - expanding my focus beyond the narrow part of data science where I had previously focused was one of the things I was hoping for here. It’s made me much more resourceful, and it helps me navigate stakeholder conversations better.

I work with teams outside of engineering much more at Grindr than I did in my previous role. This has given me a cross-functional understanding of how different parts of the business work together. I have also had opportunities to present my work to people around the entire company, which has made me better at adjusting my message to the audience and thinking through what they care about.  

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

My team is focused on building high-performing machine learning and experimentation platforms at Grindr. Grindr has done a good job serving our users throughout our history (better at some points than at others), but there are features people have come to expect from social and dating apps that we don’t offer yet. The full rollout and adoption of our new experimentation platform will help us get there. It will allow us to observe the impact our product changes have on user behavior and thus make changes to the app that our users are excited about and value.

Setting this foundation will also allow us to evaluate the impact that different versions of ML models have when they are in production. For example, does personalization in the grid lead to a better user experience, or do we see that people prefer the more straightforward distance-based approach we currently use? We are setting standards now for how we will build, evaluate, deploy, and monitor ML models and getting the tools in place to support those standards so that we can speed up our time from idea to production. Once these are in place, the sky's the limit for ML at Grindr - there are countless ways we will be able to help users make meaningful connections.

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?

I was on Team Grindr this summer in the AIDS/Lifecycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. There were about 15 of us on our team, and we spent a week biking 545 miles together to raise funds for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Los Angeles LGBT Center. Our leadership made it clear through their support that participation in this event was important to the company - many of our employees and users have been impacted by HIV and AIDS. In the months leading up to the event, we received repeated shout-outs during our all-hands meetings and encouragement while we trained.

While most companies make charitable donations, I felt like this went far beyond optics and was something Grindr employees at every level were genuinely happy to support. This experience captured the overall environment of positivity and support here. People at Grindr truly believe in supporting the global queer community.

If you are interested in working with talented data scientist like Tyler at a mission-driven company with a human centered product, you should consider applying for open positions with us!

Grindr went to a remote-first office environment in response to the global pandemic. Since then we have made remote-first our ongoing office strategy, while creating regional "hubs" where people can work in person, if and when they choose. We have also been launching and expanding new and existing perks to keep our employees productive and connected.

Our current remote-first office perks include a monthly snack box membership, money to dial-in your home office set-up, regular virtual and in-person team-building events, and monthly stipends for meals and health & wellness activities. We recently added Included Health and FOLX to our line-up of benefit offerings, which are health and wellness services that cater to the unique needs of our LGBTQ+ employees—needs that often go unaddressed by traditional health insurance companies.

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Our philosophy has been to create a perks and benefits offering that is diverse and highly tailorable. It's challenging to ensure our benefit offerings address the needs of our very diverse employee population, but it is incredibly gratifying when we find terrific organizations with which to partner, like Included Health and FOLX Health, who are as equally committed as Grindr is to improving the total health and wellness of all our employees.

Grindr takes great pride in our inclusive and progressive support for our employees and we look forward to announcing additional perks and benefits for employees and their dependents soon.

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