Welcome to #WorkItWednesday, Grindr's feature on employees and programs at the heart of the work we do to connect the global queer community.

Meet Sean Patrick Henry (he/him), one of our Product Management Directors!

‍Sean has been with Grindr for over a year and has been working in product management since 2012. His team at Grindr is in charge of our core product which is the foundation of the Grindr app. We had the chance to sit down with him to learn more about his role overseeing our core product and his team’s impact at Grindr.

Read more about Sean and his team below. Take a look at our career’s page to explore our open product job opportunities. ‍

How did you get your start in product management?‍

Growing up I was always creating and building. Crafts, computers, musicals, videos, business plans, websites, web apps, startups, and more. So before I knew about the role of a product manager, I was always learning skills to be able to solve problems and create stuff. This led to an early freelance career building web apps in the entertainment industry and launching a few startups in the LGBTQIA+ travel space. I love Broadway, travel, and back then PHP+, Javascript, so I tried to combine those passions to make fun things.‍

What drew you to product management in the dating space?‍

It wasn’t until focusing on engineering that I found opportunities to work on bigger, more collaborative, and complex products. I’m a romantic, so when OkCupid invited me to join their front-end team, it felt like a match. The product team was composed of a handful of designers and front-end engineers with no established product management process or hierarchy. Each teammate had a lot of responsibility to know the community, develop data-driven decisions, and make an impact on the product.

For a while, I was the only gay-identifying engineer and became an inadvertent advocate for the broader LGBTQIA+ community around problems faced when navigating self-expression, sex, and romance in the binary tech world. Motivating designers and engineers to help solve these problems ignited a passion for a more product management-oriented approach to development. ‍

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

I’m obsessed with the crossroads of sociology and data. Where else but Grindr can you have such a direct impact for the LGBTQIA+ community while also geeking out with code and passionate users? It’s humbling and rewarding to focus specifically on the queer experience while working with brilliant, fabulous, and supportive coworkers.‍

{{video-inline-cta}}

What interesting problems is Grindr’s product team solving for now?‍

The worldwide LGBTQIA+ community is evolving and we’ll have more opportunities and challenges to connect people while allowing more ways to express themselves, find each other, and interact. We are also balancing an established, older codebase with building out exciting new features.

Grindr helps people connect to their community around them. As we have the largest community of any LGBTQIA+ app, it’s sometimes difficult to find exactly who you’re looking for. Soon we’ll be launching My Tags, which helps people create new connections around specific interests. This is a feature to help people express themselves and be found in a more inclusive and fun way.

We also always strive to provide a private, discreet experience. We’re currently working on a privacy-centric album feature to give users control over the content they’d like to share (or unshare) with other people. We see the future of Grindr as even more inclusive, private, kinder, and connected. It’ll take humility, empathy, and grit to drive the product changes our community needs and deserves.‍

What challenges or opportunities will Grindr’s product teams be addressing in the future?‍

We’re looking forward to utilizing new technologies to allow people to express who they are through media and data. Video and chat apps are evolving fast, so we have lots of areas to innovate for delightful and cutting edge chat experiences.

Grindr is a hyper-local app that changes flavor based on where our users are, so we’ll also adapt to support more localized personalities and cultures while creating more ways to connect across distance. ‍

What are your goals for growing your team? ‍

Our product team is focused on pursuing ideas derived and validated through user research. We aim to grow a team that’s adept at listening to and understanding people outside of our own life experiences with a variety of backgrounds in design, data, business, and technology. First and foremost, we value driven, supportive humans who champion our community.

Want to work with leaders like Sean? Explore our careers page to join our team!

Grindr is the world’s largest dating and social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people and anyone who wants to connect with and be a part of the Grindr community. Naturally, we are focused on creating inclusive and forward-thinking moderation policies that honor the full expression of users’ gender identity. That said, we strongly believe that having inclusive policies is necessary for all businesses – not just those that focus on LGBTQ+ people – so that all users can feel supported, included, and welcome.

As Trust and Safety professionals in the social network and dating industry, we are honored to be a part of the evolution of content moderation strategies designed to have a meaningful impact on the lives of of trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming users. We have put together a whitepaper outlining what we've learned over our decades in the industry, in the hope that it helps others create inclusive moderation policies.

{{video-inline-cta}}

In this whitepaper, we will outline strategies and best practices for creating thoughtful, equitable, and inclusive moderation policies and practices with gender inclusion in mind. This includes policy creation, product design, moderation, training resources for the moderation team, and user-facing resources. We’ll offer insights about content moderation outside of the old-fashioned binary rules that have dominated our society and thus many platforms’ practices.

We hope that this is a useful starting point, recognizing that this is not an exhaustive effort. Even small steps can build enough momentum to be meaningful to your users.

• Download: Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation (PDF)

The idea for Grindr was born in West Hollywood, California, where the crosswalks are permanently painted with rainbows. When I joined the Grindr team In 2015, we were rounding the corner on the company’s sixth anniversary, and the app had taken off in nearly every country on earth. Becoming so global reflected on Grindr’s incredible appeal and success but also posed challenges: most of the world wasn’t (and still isn’t) as accepting a place as West Hollywood.

Grindr for Equality

Grindr has always been about helping queer people connect, but we knew that the possibilities for connection weren’t the same in every country. That’s why I came from the LGBTQ non-profit space to build Grindr for Equality, or G4E, the company’s social justice program with the mission to help create a safer, more inclusive world for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Through G4E, we endeavor to support local activism and uplift the safety, health, and human rights of LGBTQ+ people around the globe.

One of the first things I did at G4E was set up a classification system for the world’s countries based on the risk LGBTQ+ people face. As a geolocation-based app, we recognized an opportunity to do good in areas of the world that have the greatest struggle towards acceptance.

The annual State-Sponsored Homophobia Report from ILGA World and ILGA Europe’s Rainbow Europe rankings proved essential in developing the classification system, but I also needed to talk to members of my personal and professional queer networks so that we could learn how we might help address difficult incidents in their region.

This work is ever-evolving, and we continue to update and refine the inputs, but here is the five-tiered system, rated from active emergency to relative safety.

Level 5

Countries whose governments have placed active bans on the use of Grindr like Indonesia and Turkey, as well as countries where we block our services like North Korea.

Even in these banned regions, I assume that some people find ways to access Grindr, even at great risk; their safety needs are often significant, so I ensure our safety resources are translated into relevant languages and made available to them.

Level 4‍

Countries that are experiencing active, ongoing emergencies. This might either be for LGBTQ+ people specifically, like was the case in Egypt during the winter crackdown of 2017, or for a country’s entire population, regardless of sexual orientation and/or gender identity, like the beginning of the Syrian refugee crisis.

For these countries, we disable the Show Distance feature that allows users to see how far away other users are. We also provide a set of free safety features to our users, send daily push notifications to announce known risks in the area, and share available safety resources.

{{video-inline-cta}}

Level 3

Countries that are not experiencing an immediate crack down but that are still extremely unsafe for LGBTQ+ people.

Similar to the level 4 countries, users logging in from these areas of the world receive free safety features, the Show Distance feature is disabled, and weekly alerts are sent concerning risks in their area.  

Level 2

Countries that generally pose relatively little risk to LGBTQ+ people. They include places like Eswatini and Singapore where sex between men is technically illegal but the laws aren’t known to be enforced and there have been relatively few violent incidents motivated by homophobia, biphobia, or transphobia in recent years.

Even in these places, heartbreaking incidents do happen, so we provide users in this region with important safety resources, but thankfully the need isn’t so great that we send out unprompted alerts to users.

Level 1

Finally, Level 1 countries are those with progressive legal and social systems that help LGBTQ+ people thrive. When I’m asked what countries I would point to that have the best laws, I often mention Malta, a relatively small country in the Mediterranean that has instituted some of the best policies for our community.

The safety features we’ve created for countries with higher risks is something that I’m particularly proud of. We’ve instituted things like screenshot blocking, disappearing photos, and the opportunity for users to unsend messages for the upper levels of the scale. We developed these features with the more dangerous countries in mind but ultimately released them to all users in recognition that even in countries with robust LGBTQ+ laws, users anywhere can become targets.

For example, we learned that as users in Beirut moved through multiple military checkpoints they experienced abuse when soldiers recognized the Grindr app on their phones. Of course, from our perspective, the Grindr icon is meant to represent connection for our community, not a trigger for harassment and discrimination. Thanks to our collaboration with the freedom of expression organization, Article 19, and the activist developers at The Guardian Project, users are now able to disguise Grindr as a notepad app, a clock app, etc.

Although the stakes are highest in the Level 4 and 5 countries where LGBTQ+ people are actively targeted simply for being who they are and loving who they love, the truth is that our community faces risks to its safety in every corner of the globe. We hope that our efforts to help address those risks serve as an affirmation that our community deserves to be safe and healthy. In solidarity with those who suffer hardship because of who they are or how they love, we as a company work hard every day to provide a platform that facilitates joy and connection.

The Grindr app was born from the desire to create a fun, open, and safe platform for the adult queer community to find each other. Grindr’s founder, Joel Simhkai, had high hopes that the app would take off, but the demand for social connection within our community exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations. That simple idea from 12+ years ago has grown into an integral part of how the LGBTQ+ community connects and thrives throughout the world.

As part of that explosive growth, some five years ago I joined Grindr as its inaugural in-house lawyer. I am proud to work at a company that connects millions of people every day wherever they are on the globe. Every employee at the company shares the commitment to keeping our users safe, but there are specific teams—legal, privacy, support, moderation, the trust and safety team and our security engineers—who work daily on ways to develop, refine, and enforce the policies and procedures that relate to the safe and secure use of our platform by adults. From day one, this has been a key area of attention for me.

How We Protect Our Community and Vulnerable Populations

Grindr is a service for adults who agree to our Terms, Community Guidelines, and Privacy Policy. In both the Google and Apple app stores, our app has the most restrictive usage category, Mature 17+, allowing parents a simple and complete way to limit access to our app. Additionally, users must affirm that they are a legal adult, agree to be bound by Grindr’s policies, and provide their date of birth.

In addition to these policies and an industry-standard age gate at account creation, Grindr takes additional steps to support platform authenticity, and user safety, and help address circumstances if any bad actors make it onto the platform. Chief among them:

• Grindr’s moderation team reviews all user profile images before they can be seen on the service for compliance with our Community Guidelines. To eliminate any chance of misunderstanding, we do not allow images of minors, even if they are part of a family photo, for example. Additionally, images of violence, hate speech or other offensive conduct are all banned from the platform.
• Grindr provides our users with in-app reporting tools and an online Help Center as avenues to quickly report potential misconduct. The Grindr user community provides some of our most important input to help us enforce our Community Guidelines.
• Grindr’s Trust and Safety team promptly reviews user reports and, where appropriate, bans the offending user or removes the illicit content.
• Grindr has developed and continues to refine the proprietary technology tools that help us proactively flag potential underage users, bad actors, and/or illicit content. We are constantly evaluating new technology to assist us with this work.
• Our Trust & Safety team is trained to identify, escalate, and, where appropriate, report certain child endangerment scenarios to the law enforcement in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.    
• Like many social media companies, we know the potential for misuse—and even illicit use—is real. Our team works closely with law enforcement to support heir investigations through our responses to legal processes such as subpoenas.

With the hope of supporting our community’s well-being online and off, Grindr publishes (in 5 languages) a Holistic Security Guide to help empower our users with ways to stay safe both online and when meeting someone new in person for the first time.

Our Work Is Never Done

We recognize that this work is never done. That’s why we focus on hiring smart, dedicated people who are good at what they do and have key experience working on unique platforms like ours. As just one example, Alice Hunsburger and Grindr’s Customer Experience team handle many of the types of difficult matters discussed in this blog.  In just the past year, Alice and team have refreshed our Help Center, Community Guidelines, Safety Tips and moderation policies, and implemented improvements to better and quickly address our users’ concerns as we continue to grow.

Through these and other efforts, we work every day to address the ever-evolving challenges of online life. If Grindr uncovers a violation of a term of service or community standard, we take prompt action. For example, if we suspect that an underage user has accessed our platform, the account is promptly banned. Should a parent contact Grindr via email ([email protected]) regarding their underage child, we work with the parent to identify and permanently ban the profile in question. Grindr also cooperates with law enforcement in connection with the investigation of these difficult situations, and we submit reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children if the circumstances involve child exploitation and abuse.  

Moderation in this digital age raises many challenges, especially as bad actors have become increasingly sophisticated. And we welcome the help of parents and other adults, including our users, in helping keep minors off of the platform. Grindr is made available on the Apple and Google app stores but is listed in the most restrictive category of apps. As a parent myself, I, along with the entire company, encourage you to enforce the parental controls on the app store and on your minor’s device, including to control which apps they may download. These features are designed to prevent underage access to content-restricted apps like Grindr, and they are an effective first-line of defense against underage access.    

No company policy or enforcement effort can completely eliminate the ability of a motivated individual to take an action inconsistent with our Terms. But we continue to take steps to advance our practices. For Grindr, an important next step is partnering with Thorn, an industry leader in protecting minors from online harms. Through the integration of Safer’s perceptual hashing and machine learning algorithms, we will help prevent the transmission of child sexual exploitation and abuse materials. We will also continue to explore and implement additional mechanisms to enhance the safety and security of the Grindr platform.

{{video-inline-cta}}

Grindr’s Global Advocacy on Behalf of Our Most Vulnerable Community Members

With users in virtually every country in the world, we recognize the unique perspective and voice we can bring to these important global conversations. As part of our outreach with UK officials in connection with the Online Safety Bill, we noted that the app stores serve as the gatekeeper of age-appropriate apps and, often with the most personal information about app users, they have an opportunity to assume an enhanced leadership position by providing a single point of age verification on behalf of the thousands of downstream apps. App stores could centralize input from all apps to help the downstream app developers identify and remove underage users from adult-focused platforms, especially as more users utilize the single sign-on functionality provided by the app stores. In addition, Grindr has long supported the Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse developed by governments, NGOs, and industry leaders with the common goal of helping to mitigate online harms for minors.

Our Commitment to the Future

The team and I draw inspiration from the countless moments of life-affirming connection that the Grindr app facilitates every day across the world. As advocates for the best of Grindr, we feel a deep responsibility to the community we serve. That’s why we do things like limit the information shared with advertisers, and that’s why we are working tirelessly every day towards a stronger community, a Safer world, and demonstrate our commitment to continually reflecting on how we can better serve our community in a secure and meaningful way. We look forward to the journey ahead.

- Bill Shafton, VP, Business & Legal Affairs | LinkedIn

Note: There are 22 linked sources in this response. For convenience, we have also listed them separately at the end of our response.

A small, conservative Catholic-focused blog released a story last week that revealed an unethical witch hunt to out a US priest for being gay, in part because he appears to have used Grindr.

The whole situation is ugly. We agree with how the incident is characterized in an editorial from Washington Post, describing the blog’s work as “unethical homophobic innuendo.” The number of ethical, moral, and legal lines the bloggers brazenly crossed in their work is astounding. All this to out a member of the clergy as gay. As UpWorthy writes on the matter, “It's a shame that Catholics such as [the target] are forced by doctrine to live their lives in the shadows.”

America: A Jesuits Review spoke with a data analytics firm that calls the data used in the blog’s investigation “alarming” and “unusually comprehensive,” going well beyond what is “available to advertising firms.” The data analytics firm estimates that the “database and deanonymization efforts” used would have “run into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.”

Our Investigation

When we learned of the blog post last week, we started an investigation into the incident. We assembled a group of industry experts to assist our investigation. The first step is to try to determine what actually occurred, which is difficult as the bloggers themselves have provided vague and incomplete descriptions of their work.

What is clear is that this work involved much more than just a small blog. We get confirmation of this in two places. First, the Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported that a group motivated by “Church reform” approached them back in 2018 to peddle a surveillance method that promised to uncover church members who used “hook-up apps such as Grindr and Tinder.” We also learn that the authors of the blog worked for CNA at this time. In rejecting the offer to these “reformers,” CNA says “it is hard to make the case that [the information] was acquired in a completely legal and moral manner.”

Next, the bloggers confirm their data set comes from another group in a subsequent podcast. They say an outside party, as with the CNA, approached them with a broad data set that would let them link dating app use to priests’ phones.

We do not believe Grindr to be the source of the data, nor do we think the evidence we have seen suggests this is the case. Grindr does not sell data about its users to anyone. The contracts with our ad partners carry strong restrictions on the information we provide them such as prohibitions on attempts to reverse engineer user identity and selling or transferring our data to another entity, and they detail for which purposes our data is permitted to be used within their systems. We regularly audit these partners to ensure they are in compliance with our data protection agreements.

We get a few other clues to help guide our investigation in the CNA article. Both CNA and the bloggers say the group that approached them promised their system would expose priests on “hookup apps like Grindr or Tinder,” so whatever their method, it seems to work on more than just Grindr. Next, consider this strange sentence from the blog: “The mobile device correlated to [the target] emitted hookup app signals.” To us, this suggests the data set is at a network level (ie, mobile carrier, ISP, or WiFi network). The bloggers have resisted repeated requests to be more forthcoming about the source of their data, so we cannot yet exclude other potential sources.

Currently, we are focusing on three potential sources:

1. Network providers: Data that may have come from network providers (mobile carriers, ISPs, or WiFi owners). It is known that carriers had sold information like this during the period of time covered by the bloggers' work. More on that here, here, and here.
2. Location data brokers: This is a tricky space, in particular, one company called X-Mode was identified to be selling user location data gathered from developers who accepted money to provide X-Mode user location while on their apps. Grindr has never partnered with X-Mode or any of its competitors. There is potential these brokers might link to data from source 1.
3. Ad networks: It is possible that one of our former or current partners, or one of their downstream ad partners, knowingly or unknowingly is the source of the data involved. We will investigate this possibility (potentially related to source 2) and pursue those who have violated our agreements.

In scenario 1, Grindr encrypts our app’s network communications. As a result, network providers cannot see what a user is doing on our app. They would not have access to our location data or other user activity on the app at this level. The network providers have their own access to location data from the user’s device and can see that our app is running and when it is using their network. There are ways we try to make this harder, but neither Grindr nor other developers can stop this. We are not aware of any terms of service to which a consumer has agreed that would allow this data to be sold by any of these network providers, and today all US carriers say they have stopped this practice.

Scenario 2 includes an interesting twist, as one of X-Mode’s biggest customers is the US government, via the military and other organizations. When X-Mode’s practices were exposed in 2020, both Apple and Google banned apps from providing them data in December 2020, though to this day some apps in the Google Play Store are still shown to be sending data to X-Mode. X-Mode (or any competitor) does not have access to Grindr data directly. But X-Mode says they employ other, less reliable methods to collect location information for their system. One method in particular called “bid-stream data” could be involved, but even X-Mode’s CEO admits this method yields low-quality geo data, particularly bad for uses such as tracking a specific device over a period of time.

Scenario 3 would involve a current or former ad partner, or one of their downstream ad partners,  as the source of data. An outside party may have used methods prohibited by Grindr and our partners to collect data, similar to the “bid-stream” method described in scenario 2. In 2020, we reviewed all our ad partnerships and terminated those in which we were not comfortable a partner was taking enough precautions to meet our standards for privacy and data protection. But there is another issue with this source. The group behind the system said it worked for “hookup apps like Tinder or Grindr”. The chances of a common ad platform between Tinder and Grindr is low.

Aggressive Steps

Back in April 2020, Grindr took the aggressive step to stop sharing age, gender, or location information with any of our ad partners. We did this out of an abundance of caution rather than in response to a specific incident. We also do not share any information users put in their profiles with ad partners. None. This leaves almost no data for 3rd parties to use in ad targeting on Grindr, and, as a result, our third party ads are very untargeted. The other result of this change from 2020, is that going forward the risks in scenarios 2 and 3 are massively mitigated, as none of the ad bidding process includes location data from Grindr.

{{video-inline-cta}}

To put our decision to reduce ad targeting data in the proper context, we want to give you a comparison to a big player in the industry. Facebook announced this week that it will begin to limit advertising targeting for underage users on its properties to only: age, gender and location. The NY Times recognizes this change from Facebook as an effort to “protect teenagers,” suggesting it is in response to criticism the company had not done enough to “prevent underage users from sexual predators and bullying.” Those three data points about underage users, you will notice, are the exact ones Grindr stopped sharing more than a year ago, and our app is exclusively 18+.

One reason we can be aggressive in limiting ad targeting at Grindr is that our primary source of revenue isn’t ads. Our dominant source of revenue and growth is premium subscriptions. This makes it easier for us to cut back almost to nothing on data for ad targeting, to reduce the number of partners, and to reduce the total number of ads significantly over the past year. We will continue to reduce the ads we show to our users throughout 2021, letting us focus more on the quality of the user experience. You may have read many allegations about Grindr and ad data. Much of it is false. To learn more about our work on ads and privacy, check out this article from our Chief Privacy Officer: Ads on Grindr: Setting the Record Str8.

Propagating Hateful Stereotypes

Back to the bloggers. If their post stopped at outing their target, it would be terrible, but they aren’t done and things move from ugly to really warped, revealing their deeper agenda. Moving from their “unethical, homophobic” work to out a priest, they next begin an attempt to directly connect dating apps to pedophilia. LGBTQ Nation noted this bizarre jump and says, “The [blog] even quotes a Catholic seminary professor who said that using Grindr is ‘only a step away from sexual predation.’ The bloggers propagate hateful stereotypes of gay and bi men as rapists and child molesters.” After making this ridiculous connection, they pause for an inconvenient admission: despite the extent of their multi-year investigation, the bloggers uncovered “no evidence to suggest that [the target] was in contact with minors.” None.

Grindr For Equality

At Grindr, keeping our users safe is not just a technical or legal issue. LGBTQ+ people continue to face violence and discrimination simply for being who they are and loving who they love. To forward the cause of LGBTQ justice, in 2012 we established Grindr For Equality (G4E). G4E is led by Jack Harrison-Quintana, an unequaled expert in these issues who has spent over a decade fighting for the safety, health, and human rights of the community all over the world.

Grindr for Equality leverages the company’s resources and global reach to support LGBTQ activists doing work in their local communities. By bridging the gap between Grindr users and advocacy organizations, G4E has fought community outbreaks from HIV to meningitis to COVID-19; it has mobilized users in the fight for global equality; and it has supported groundbreaking initiatives to find new ways to push the community forward. Working with our team, G4E provides online safety resources in more than twenty languages and sexual health information in more than fifty languages.

The world has learned that when a small group of motivated ideologues are involved, it is difficult to protect anyone against all threats. Even so, we at Grindr are fully committed to protecting our users both in our platform and through our advocacy work. We will continue with our investigation to uncover what actually occurred in this case, and we are eager to determine if we can improve how we protect our users. We will report back with an update soon.

We would love your help. If you have more information about systems or methods used by these bloggers, please contact us here. If you have information on any potential security vulnerability in our service or app, please let us know here on our HackerOne bug-bounty page. Lastly, I want to thank the millions of people who use Grindr every day to find connections, friendships, and love. All of us at Grindr are dedicated to supporting and promoting the LGBTQ+ community.

Referenced Sources

The Washington Post

The Pillar investigation of Monsignor Burrill is unethical, homophobic innuendo

A Catholic newsletter promised investigative journalism. Then it outed a priest using Grindr data

UpWorthy

Catholic bishop who tried to deny Joe Biden communion caught on Grindr

America: The Jesuit Review

What we do and don’t know about the methods used to track the Grindr habits of a top USCCB priest

Catholic News Agency

Concerns about using surveillance technology to track Catholic bishops and priests

ExpressVPN Research

ExpressVPN's Research on Phone Location Tracking

Vice.com

More Muslim Apps Worked with X-Mode, Which Sold Data to Military Contractors

MarTech.org

Pulling back the curtain on location intelligence

Facebook
Giving Young People a Safer, More Private Experience

NY Times
Instagram Introduces Changes to Protect Teenagers on Its Platform

The Verge

Google and Apple are banning technology for sharing users’ location data

Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T pledge again to close data access after location-tracking scandal

GovTech

Wireless Carriers Face $200M Fine for Selling Location Data

Vox.com

How T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T use your web browsing, app usage, and location data to serve you ads

Grindr | Blog

Ads on Grindr: Setting the Record Str8

Grindr Security

Grindr's Privacy and Cookie Policy

LGBTQ Nation

Top US priest busted looking for gay hook-ups. He ran an anti-LGBTQ group.

Grindr | G4E

Grindr for Equality

International Safety Tips

Holistic Safety Guide

International Community Resources

As an app committed to transparency and open communication with our users, we spend a lot of time listening to people’s feedback both on and off Grindr. So when we see misperceptions about our app and the work we do to provide the best user experience possible, we take it to heart. In this post, we wanted to address two specific misconceptions we’ve seen, and give you more insight into how our support and moderation process works.                  

Misconception 1: Grindr bans people for no reason, either because we don’t care about our users or because Grindr somehow benefits from banning innocent users.       ‍

Misconception 2: Grindr doesn’t care about spam or abuse, and is purposely not banning the spam accounts because we make money off them.                            

‍Misconception 1: “Grindr bans people for no reason.”                                      

It might help to approach this misconception with a quick cost-benefit analysis. What would the pros and cons be for Grindr to ban people for no reason?

‍Pros:                

• None  

Cons:                  

• Dissatisfied users              
• Negative app reviews and ratings                                      
• Fewer users, resulting in decreased subscription and ad revenue (yes, Grindr is a business, and like many other popular apps you might use, we rely on subscription and ad revenue to help keep our app accessible to all.)

The simple truth is that Grindr has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by banning users for no reason. That said, we work hard to keep Grindr safe and free of behavior that violates our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service . Prohibited behavior includes: spam, impersonation, prostititution and solicitation, marketing of outside services, harassment, drug dealing or promoting drug use, underage users, and other negative activities on Grindr. For example, if someone knowingly files a false report about a user, in an attempt to get them banned, that can result in the reporter being banned.

The work to handle bans on Grindr is incredibly difficult, and we combine complex software with over 100 people on our customer support and moderation team to do that work. The work of our users who submit reports when they see bad behavior is incredibly important. We appreciate your help.

Even still, mistakes can happen. In some cases, a warning is more appropriate than a ban. We will introduce a warning system later this year, but in the meantime, we have a process for banned customers to appeal their case. All ban appeals are investigated by our support team members. The process is time consuming and expensive for Grindr, but we want to correct any mistakes.

We often hear the complaint from a banned user, “I got no explanation for my ban.” This is a tough one. There are a few reasons why we can’t provide much detail. First, it’s important to protect the privacy of users who may have reported the issues, so we can’t say “User [XYZ] reported you for solicitation.” Secondly, for some abuse, such as spamming, the details we might provide help the abusing party improve their methods. When people know how they were caught, they are just that much harder to catch the next time.    

{{video-inline-cta}}          

Misconception 2: “Grindr doesn’t ban enough because it makes money off these spam accounts”                                      

Ironically, the opposite of the first misconception is that we don’t ban enough. The assumption here is that Grindr benefits from spam on our platform. This is completely false. Grindr in no way benefits from spam on our platform, neither financially nor in terms of the safety and happiness of our users. Again, a look at the pros and cons of allowing spam on Grindr doesn’t support the idea that Grindr somehow benefits from spam:                 

Pros:

• ‍None

Cons:       

• Bad user experience—what’s worse than getting excited to receive a new message only to realize it’s spam
• Negative app reviews and ratings
• Fewer users, resulting in decreased subscription and ad revenue                    

As we said above , Grindr is fighting and banning spam non-stop, 24/7, 365 days a year. Spam is our most reported and banned category. The fight against spammers, particularly on an instantaneous chat service where users seek significant privacy, is a big challenge. Our goal is to prevent and remove spam before it’s reported. We use a number of systems in the fight, including a new AI-powered service that helps us detect “non-human” usage of Grindr. Though we are constantly surprised how often we find users with the amazing ability to behave like a machine. Slow down, people!

Recently, we have made significant progress, and spam reports have dropped significantly. But it’s an ongoing battle, and today’s victories can quickly become tomorrow’s new battlefront. Of course, less spam isn’t the goal, no spam is, so we will keep up the fight on bots and spam in the service.

‍We Want The Best Service For You

The Grindr team is committed to creating a safe and authentic environment where diversity, mutual respect, and sex-positivity flourish. Minimizing abuse and spam on our platform is a constant endeavor, and banning people for no reason or allowing spam on our platform would be counterintuitive to everything we strive to achieve for both our users and our business. Thanks to the hard work of our team over the last six months, complaints related to unfair banning and poor support are down significantly and continue to drop each month. We are not done, and remain committed to providing our users with the best platform to connect, thrive and love. We are listening, we appreciate all your help, and we are here for you!

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

As our Chief Privacy Officer and in honor of Data Privacy Day 2021, I’d like to address one of the areas that I think many people get wrong about privacy at Grindr: online advertising.

Grindr is the world’s leading LGBTQ+ social application, and with that position comes fair and frequent critique of how we approach complex issues like online advertising and user privacy. There has been much hypothesized in the press over the last few years as to what Grindr does in this area of the business. Unfortunately many get it wrong—very wrong in some cases—so I’m here to set the record “str8” and remove any uncertainty or doubt regarding our commitment to user privacy.

Like many mobile applications, we support the free version of Grindr through advertising and rely on ad partners to help us in this effort. Much of the incorrect reporting in this area is on what data is shared with our advertising partners, so let’s address the key areas:

Precise Location‍

Grindr is a location-centric application, so it is understandable that people assume that we’d share your location information with our advertisers, but that’s a misconception—we do NOT share precise location data with advertisers. Grindr’s ad partners can leverage a device’s IP Address to get a general sense of where the user is in the world, but accuracy drops sharply below city level detail.  

Additionally, and perhaps not as well known as I’d like, Grindr never collects the full precision of a device’s location. We leverage the mobile operating system’s option to only provide us location data “within 100 meters of accuracy of your actual location.” This is why if you and a friend are dining out together (pre-Covid-19) and are both on Grindr, you may find some inconsistencies around the proximity of the profiles in your view. Your friend, who is less than a meter away from you, will show a few profiles out from you in your app, whereas someone two restaurants away may show up right next to you. This is by design. We’re confident that if you’re really into one another you’ll be able to sort through the 100m masking and figure out how to connect.

Age and Gender‍

Grindr users represent a wide variety of age ranges and, to some people’s surprise, a range of gender identifications. In many online advertising scenarios, it may be acceptable from a privacy perspective to share these details to better inform the contextual nature of ads a user may receive. But again, Grindr does NOT share this information with our ad partners.

If we don’t share location, age, or gender, what does Grindr share with ad partners?‍

We share the basics and only the basics: the mobile advertising ID (MAID) of the device (which users have full control over within their mobile operating system), IP Address (needed to communicate with the user’s device), and device details like make, model, OS version, etc. MAIDs are used to track which ads are seen and clicked on in a way not associated with a user’s personal information. Device information is used to deliver the best ads a particular device can support (lower quality video or even static ads are shown on older, slower devices, for example) and to help catch the bad guys who may be using emulators to trick the ad ecosystem in overcounting ad impressions or clicks to make money.

That’s it!  We share only the most basic information—which users largely control—and nothing about a user’s Grindr account details. This last point is worth repeating: there is nothing from within a user’s Grindr account details that is shared with an ad partner. Full stop.  

We care deeply about the privacy of our users, and we approach advertising policy globally so any Grindr user across the planet can rest assured that the details above are the same for them.

I hope this clears up some of the misconceptions and misreporting around how Grindr approaches ads on our platforms. If you have more questions about ad privacy or other areas of privacy at Grindr, please reach out to us at [email protected] and check out the Privacy section of our Help Center.

-Shane Wiley, Chief Privacy Officer | LinkedIn

{{video-inline-cta}}

When Trump was elected in 2016, I looked out the office of a Fortune 50 law firm and said to myself: “It's time to get to work.” Four years ago on the day that Trump was being inaugurated, I was interviewing at Grindr to be their first in-house counsel. Since that time, I've had the honor of serving as Security Officer under the National Security Agreement with the United States of America, representing the company, the community, and the country working as a team to ensure that Grindr's user data remains safe and secure in the United States.

{{video-inline-cta}}

Today’s inauguration represents an opportunity for all people, irrespective of social class, racial origin, sex, or gender, to reimagine the innate sense of pride and purpose that comes with being your most authentic self. It remains my honor to be a part of a supremely talented and experienced team working tirelessly so that Grindr can realize its next chapters of success in providing a platform where the global LGBTQ+ community can connect and thrive.

May we all stay connected, working and thriving together.

On Tuesday, December 29th at approximately 3:30pm PST, Grindr experienced a bug with our moderation systems. These systems were designed to fight spam, but unfortunately this incident resulted in the unintentional banning of several Grindr members during a 17-minute window of time. The issue was detected and rectified within those 17 minutes and all affected users were fully unbanned within 2 hours.

{{video-inline-cta}}

We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this caused. We are actively working to ensure this does not happen again and we are committed to continually improving our moderation systems in 2021.

The Grindr team wishes you a joyous holiday season!

We’re giving our users a little something extra to open this holiday season with Grindr Unwrapped, an informal stats report that sheds some light on the year in Grindr activity. If you couldn’t already tell from the name, we were inspired by Spotify’s annual Spotify Wrapped, which we look forward to every December even though it tells many of us here at Grindr HQ the same thing year after year (“your music taste is…gay”). And since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we decided to throw our hat in the ring in 2020 with a look at sex & dating trends among the nearly 13 million gay, bi, trans & queer folks who use our app each month.

Now, before you balk at the claim that Chile is a hot spot for tops, or that Sweden is home to a higher-than-average bottom population, we wanted to offer a caveat. This data only represents a subsection of our users (not all Grindr users include this information on their profiles), and Grindr itself only represents a subsection of the global queer community. So it’s important to note that this is not meant as a comprehensive or scientific report on global queer sex & dating behaviors. Instead, it’s meant as a fun and informal way to help our users get to know each other better, serve as an ice-breaker for conversations in the app, and provide some insights into Grindr activity trends from the year.

It was a year unlike any other, and many of the usual ways people enjoy Grindr—in-person dates, hookups, tennis (yes, some of us use Grindr to find tennis partners)—were off the table in 2020 due to COVID-19. But that doesn’t mean people weren’t still connecting. This snapshot of activity shows that even in a year of quarantine and isolation, people still found ways to express themselves and connect safely from home.

Dig in below, and cheers to a safer and more connected 2021.

Alex Black, Head of Marketing | LinkedIn

{{video-inline-cta}}

In the spirit of the season, we wanted to share some of the holiday traditions that help us get through the most wonderful—and sometimes most stressful—time of the year. Check out our favorite festive guilty pleasures, family recipes, self-care secrets, Yuletide tunes and more below. Happy holidays from all of us at Grindr!

TRAVIS BRACE, CUSTOMER SUPPORT PROGRAM MANAGER

I absolutely adore the holidays. I’m fortunate enough to have a supportive, enthusiastic family, and insane enough to insist on hosting them year after year for Christmas. As it’s the only holiday my family gathers to celebrate, providing the Christmas House™ is a… stressful undertaking. I do enjoy being the planner of the family (I’ve been “lovingly” nicknamed Drill Sergeant Trav, after my affinity for traditions and agendas), but my favorite tradition doesn’t involve anyone but myself—and Eartha Kitt.

Every Christmas Eve, when not a creature is stirring, I pour a glass (read: bottle) of Lambrusco, slip on a Santa hat, and run a hot bath. While “Santa Baby” plays on repeat, I sit in the tub and do absolutely nothing. And that’s it. That’s the tea, y’all. Even Santa needs some Me Time.

So, this holiday season, remember to give yourself the gift of self-care. No matter your traditions, the best way to spread Christmas cheer is doing whatever you need to be happy and healthy.

ALEX BLACK, HEAD OF MARKETING

My love for Christmas trees goes deep, and the amount of time and thought I put into my bush each year borders on irrational. Two years ago was a tiki-themed tree, with hula grass for the skirt (naturally) and cocktail umbrellas galore. Last year it was a Dolly Parton-themed tree, replete with luscious locks of platinum blond hair, mini-45” records, and little pink guitars.

This year’s theme is She-Devil, and the over-the-top stylings of Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep’s 1989 camp classic will be on full display with romance novel covers, lace doilies, flames, devil horns, and cascading strands of ‘80s power pearls. The only video that makes me feel seen in my tree obsession during the holidays, and one that I cue up each year to get in the spirit (much to my partner’s chagrin), is this hilarious masterpiece by John Roberts.

Written by and starring John Roberts. Directed by Clay Weiner. Edited by Jesse Reisner. DP Drew Denicola. A mom and her christmas tree

ALICE HUNSBERGER, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Piparkökur (Icelandic Black Pepper Gingerbread - vegan)‍

(recipe adapted from the post punk kitchen vegan gingerbread)

My mother's side of the family is Icelandic and we always enjoy our gingerbread cookies extra-spicy with lots of black pepper. It's not the holiday season without these in our house! You can eat these plain, or ice them and decorate them. I usually use snowflake cookie cutters for these, but if you want to make cute gingerbread people, go all out!

What you’ll need:

1/3 cup canola oil

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup molasses

1/4 cup plain milk (soy, almond, oat, cow, all work here)

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

spice blend:

1/2 teaspoon each ground nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon black pepper

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly grease your cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.

In a large bowl whisk together oil and sugar for about 3 minutes. Add molasses and milk and stir some more.

Add dry ingredients and mix until a stiff dough is formed. Most recipes say to chill the dough, but I never bother and the cookies always end up fine. They're a bit more fiddly to cut out so you need to be careful, but it also means you don't need to wait 2 more hours to eat your cookies!

On a lightly floured surface roll the dough out to a little less than 1/4 inch thick. Cut out your shapes and plonk on your baking sheet.

Bake for 8 minutes. Let cool - the longer you keep them on the baking sheet while cooling, the more crispy they will get.

MONTY SUWANNUKUL, LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER

My parents both emigrated from Thailand when they were teenagers, so our holidays were very much a mashup of things they remembered from the homeland and traditions they learned from host families, college friends and next door neighbors. Like the other families in our Northern California suburb, we would have large meals for Thanksgiving and Christmas, often with our own stragglers: a visiting cousin, an old college pal, or, in my adult years, my friends from the city whose families lived too far away.

Every one of these meals has started with what is known as the Crabbatizer, a massive platter of broken-down crab, pounded piece by piece by my dad and organized by limb type. This admittedly macabre scene is served alongside a punishingly delicious spicy sauce made from garlic, chili, lime juice, pepper and fish sauce. Dad says the secret ingredient is a dash of warm water, which is just crazy enough to be true. In past years, these holidays have coincided with the influx of local (and huge) California Dungeness Crab, but this year the crabbing season was pushed back to protect some migrating humpback whales. And so in 2020, we had smaller crabs for our smaller holiday.

STACY BACA, ACCOUNT MANAGER

The Christmas season in our house was always filled with music. Dad would begin dusting off those old records in the first week after Thanksgiving. I have so many good memories of wrapping presents, trimming the tree, making Christmas cookies with Mom and my big bro to these family favorites! Happy Holidays!!!!

ALINA LEBRON, SALESFORCE ADMINISTRATOR

Holidays don't feel right without these 3 things: Christmas trees, proper decor, and saving the best for last...COQUITO! Coquito is the Puerto Rican version of eggnog. It doesn't have eggs, but it sure has lots of rum! Every year, I usually make batches of this delicious drink, put them in decorated mason jars, and hand them out to my closest friends of the year in a Santa hat. No one can resist!

Discover & share this Rum GIF with everyone you know. GIPHY is how you search, share, discover, and create GIFs.

{{video-inline-cta}}

SHANE WILEY, CHIEF PRIVACY OFFICER

I’ve always loved this time of year because it’s centered on giving to others. Even as a youngster I found myself drawn to what I could give over what presents I received. One of my fondest traditions was established when my nieces and nephews asked for the option to bundle their b-day with Christmas, essentially allowing them to "double up" their budget and go big on Christmas. This put even more pressure on me to make a big impact with their gifts, but I enjoyed the challenge.

Last year the youngest crossed into adulthood, and most of them now have kids of their own, so I focus more on spoiling my mom  these days (new iPad this year). I do enjoy a bit of a holiday comfort in eating one of my favorite "bad foods" on this planet: a Kringle!!! Kringles are hand-rolled from Danish pastry dough (wienerbrød dough) that has been rested overnight before shaping, filling, and baking. Many sheets of the flaky dough are layered, then shaped into an oval. After filling with fruit, nut, or other flavor combinations, the pastry is baked and iced. Give yourself and your family a treat this year!

BILL SHAFTON, VP BUSINESS & LEGAL AFFAIRS

My holiday heart strings usually resonate on core matters—so connecting with friends and family and other purposeful activities. Hanukkah, known as the Festival of Lights, inevitably inspires me to create new music with the intent of harmonizing with that Light. That, some tennis, and Krispy Kreme donuts will round out what I hope will be a peaceful time for all of us.

The official GIPHY channel for Saturday Night Live. Saturdays at 11:30/10:30c! #SNL

WADDIE GRANT, EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

My favorite activity to do during the holiday season, besides attending open buffet and bar events, is going to holiday photo pop-ups in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I find so much creative inspiration when I participate at these pop-ups, in front of or behind the camera phone.

MUNIR ESTEVANE, PRINCIPAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Something that I look for during holidays is spending them with close friends—our chosen family.

Recently it has not been so easy to meet in person (we’re pretty spread out geographically), but something that really has helped make pandemic-affected holidays less lonely is Discord, an app that makes it easier to talk, video chat, and hang out with friends.

We get together two or three times a week on Discord for movie watching, game playing, or simply to share photos and chat it up with drinks!

ZAYED KADDOURA, DIRECTOR FP & A

This time of year, for most, is about family and traditions. Growing up in the Middle East, I didn’t celebrate Christmas, and I now live more than eight thousand miles away from home.

The Christmas traditions I celebrate today are ones I’ve formed with what I lovingly refer to as my American family: my college roommate’s parents, who practically adopted me as their own. Allow me to paint a picture: Arab teenager moves to Pennsylvania, knows nobody, joins a fraternity, and ends up with a stocking on the wall and gifts under the Christmas tree of a suburban household.

From my years of celebrating with them, I’ve adopted some of their traditions, like spending the entire day in a onesie, free-flowing mimosas starting at 8:00am, an A+ charcuterie board, gift exchanges, and movie marathons. To help get me through this years’ quarantined Christmas, I fully intend on having my 8:00am mimosa, in a onesie, while I binge watch Desperate Housewives.

JAY SOJKA, ASSOCIATE HR GENERALIST

The Holidays are such a special time to revisit some of my favorite traditions. Despite this year being a much smaller crowd, COVID won’t crush my Christmas spirit. My partner and I still have a large appetite for some mulled wine, Freeform’s 25 days of Christmas movies, and dressing up our pets in cheesy holiday pajamas.

Everything has changed this year (understatement of the century). Quarantine has forced us to reconstruct our lives in an almost entirely digital space. But they say constraints breed creativity, and that’s definitely the case for Rob Tennent, a recent fashion graduate of Auckland University of Technology in Zealand. Faced with the news that his senior class would no longer have a final runway show due to COVID-19 restrictions and budget cuts, Rob decided to showcase his collection on Grindr.

“The idea came to me as I was scrolling through Grindr and saw a faceless torso sporting a vintage Helmut Lang singlet. This was the lightbulb moment. I thought, if I could get around six accounts to post images in my singlets, it’d look cohesive and would emulate a lookbook/ campaign.” So that’s just what he did.

We spoke with Rob about the project, fashion, Grindr, and more. Here are some snippets from our conversation:

What are you wearing right now?

Sitting in a cafe called Annabel’s, in a pair of vintage Levi’s and a thrifted Acne shirt.

Tell us about your upbringing/coming out experience.

I was born in Cambodia to a Vietnamese mother and a European father. I moved to St. Lucia and Papua, New Guinea for a few years before settling in New Zealand at the age of 12. I then went to an all boys boarding school here for five years, which was certainly a unique experience for a soon-to-be-out queer teenager. (Shout out to my best friends Luca and Tyler, I would have not survived without my gays!) I came out to my dad when I turned 16 and he responded the way any parent should: with love. I then came out to my mum who told me she pretty much knew from my early childhood but never cared to ask. I have been extremely fortunate.  ‍

What made you decide to pursue fashion?

At boarding school, we had a fabric technology class where we had to sew a pencil case in six weeks. I had completed mine in the first week and the teacher encouraged me to try making a shirt or some pants, which I did. I then realised how much I loved doing it and how much more I wanted to learn.

Who are your biggest design influences?

Rick Owens and Helmut Lang.

What's your favorite/least favorite fashion trend fo late?

Favourite: probably bucket hats, I think they are cute. Least would probably be repeating a logo and using it as a print, but I think that is on its way out.

Tell us about your graduate collection.

Originally, I wanted to step away from this aesthetic and go for tailored suits, similar to pieces Phoebe Philo did for Céline. A week before I was due to start this project, we entered a five week lockdown, and then another after that, and I realized I wouldn’t be able to do the original idea. I actually had started these singlets the year before, and I had all the patterns and research already available, so I decided to revisit it and make a second iteration. The cut out ideas were inspired by Helmut Lang’s 2004 collection. I made them all into body suits because I hate it when things come untucked.

Where is the ideal place to wear these designs?

Clubbing for sure. I designed this for the club scene. When you want to show off some skin but not too much. The garment is relaxed yet sensual at the same time.

Why do you think fashion means so much to the LGBTQ+ community?

I think when you feel ostracized, you learn to give less of a fuck as you get more confident in your own skin. For me, I was suppressed for so long in a heterosexual space that as soon as I had any freedom, I went wild with it. Society tells us to hide and be ashamed, so in many ways it is an act of rebellion to be different and expressive. I certainly have been through the phase of finding myself and trying new things such as make up and dressing differently, it’s liberating.

What's New Zeland's queen scene like?

We all exist in our own little bubbles. I try to integrate myself as much as I can but I mainly stick to a smaller crowd. We actually only have one or two gay bars and even then it’s usually the same people. The community is small and especially now without international travel, it has shrunk immensely. There has certainly been a surge in queer parties and safe spaces that are being organised by figures in the community that are determined to make an impact and change. I support where I can and am as vocal as I can be, but I would love to do more. I’d say I sit slightly outside the community, I’m an Aquarius so I’m quite distant and aloof.

What's your Grindr like? Any favorite memories?

I remember being on a school trip in Sydney and chatting to a really hot guy. I snuck out of my hotel room to go on a date with him. Afterwards, I texted my straight roommate telling him to go for a long walk so I could have this guy over. While we were hooking up I heard a knock on the door—it was my teacher telling me to get ready for dinner while this guy was literally standing behind the door fully naked! I don't know how I got away with it. Three years later, we still keep in touch. He has come to Auckland and I have gone to Sydney and we stay with each other each time. A very special man! That’s probably the most successful memory I have.

What's been getting you through quarantine?

Comfort food. Mac ‘n’ cheese. Instant Raman noodles. Brownies.

What's next for you?

I am just going to enjoy New Zealand summer and everything it has to offer! I realised I have never explored the small towns in our beautiful country, so I will be road tripping around with my little film camera. I will continue creating content and working with brands here, but probably will move in a year or so! I’d love to maybe publish another book or dabble in film/directing. No set plan, just going with the flow!

{{video-inline-cta}}