Governments. It was likely used by governments.
Bi men who live straight lives with a wife and family are ridiculously common. The ability to blackmail those people is extremely valuable to certain state organizations.
Bi men who live straight lives with a wife and family are ridiculously common. The ability to blackmail those people is extremely valuable to certain state organizations.
I wasn't speaking directly to that, moreso that secrets have value. Some people would reveal their secrets rather than be controlled with them, others will define the value of their secrets by what they're willing to do maintain them.
This remains something quite a lot of people want to remain secret.
A bi man with a wife and a family could very well be having sexual encounters with men once in a while with the agreement of his wife (who could well have her own stuff going on too) and it could be a very healthy thing in what is a fulfilling relationship for both parties.
People have been advocating for marriage contracts that are a bit like the CC license, where you can pick the parts that you agree on.
(There are some automatic protections in the event of a separation.)
Sodomy laws were still on the books - can you keep a clearance while openly breaking the law every time you and your partner sleep together?
It's entirely possible that even the ability to verify that a particular email address has a Grindr account may be enough to threaten a person with imprisonment or death in several countries I can think of off the top of my head.
So when an email-address is entered to create an account, you always respond with "pending email verification". Then you send an email saying "Someone is registering an account with us using this address." And then, when the account already exists, you continue with "lol it already exists. If this was you, you can click to reset your password". If there is no account under that address, you send the "please click to verify" mail. At no point does this process expose the status of the address.
That's what I have been told is the current policy in France. As long as you cannot be blackmailed with it, it is good.
They're not that common. The literature shows a bimodal straight/gay distribution of homosexual tendency in men and a more Gaussian distribution in women.
See Robert Green's book "The Laws of Human Nature" (2018) for his take on the following. It's very insightful. (Chapter entitled, "The Law of Gender Rigidity")
'Masculine thinking' prefers to categorise and bifurcate. (Dualism.) I'm a guy and I consider myself having a 'super' 'male' brain in some aspects even more than the average. I find it very hard to multi-task, and I easily hyperfocus.
Male thinking solves problems by breaking things down and focusing on one part of the picture at a time. It's about specialisation.
Female thinking treats things more as a whole, with everything connected. It solves problems by looking at the whole picture at once. It's about multi-tasking.
I now see that 'male thinking' (as opposed to males), such as 'specialisation', dominates modern capitalism and public policy, and often to detriment. Most females at top levels in business at this time in our culture would appear to mostly have this success because they are 'atypically' strong in 'masculine thinking'.
Personally, I think such leadership needs more female thinking. I'm slowly trying to understand it more, as my own starting point. Modern diversity policies that change what's on the outside (how many penises are around the table) don't actually solve the real problems. We're still picking what's taking place on the inside. We need diversity of things far deeper - to embrace and celebrate true 'feminine thinking' - not just what's on the surface.
So anyway, this could help explain why female sexuality is seen to be more 'fluid', on average, than among males. It's not so much how people actually are, as how people see themselves, because of how they tend to be wired. And this is not even factoring in that there is greater cultural stigma around a male being bi vs. a female being bi.
I am a male, and 100% bi.
Seriously?
Surely the way someone identifies public doesn't necessarily match with reality.
If you are visible on Grindr, you have made a kind of public testimony.
So, you have reduced your blackmail risk - since you're already at least somewhat prepared for this information to be public.
Why is blackmail the risk that people on this page are going to, then, is my question. If you're willing to make a public statement then blackmail is lower risk, not higher risk.
If someone gets your grindr account they can get your (a) address, (b) phone number, and (c) private photos, none of which would otherwise be public. So let's just get that out there. A reasonable user would not expect that any of those three things are readily available to a stranger that they've never talked to who merely has their email address. Especially if they turn off distances specifically to avoid triangulation attacks on their location.
Those pieces of information can be used together to harrass, commit violence, or threaten to leak your photos or personal (albeit sure, not "private") conversations. Those are the obvious ones, but other information in there can also hidden from public view, like HIV status.
With this bug a malicious person could knowingly target you based on email address instead of finding you and even putting the work into catfishing you into sending them embarrassing photos.
I'd say that's a higher blackmail risk but only because of the hack, a little. Catfishes still existed but this makes doing it invisible and massive in scale while associating it with a public ID like your email address.