A priest was outed for using Grindr, experts say it’s a warning sign for privacy
slate.com
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Add that to 3rd party apps that can find your exact location (https://www.engadget.com/2018-09-15-grindr-location-info.htm...) and Grindr becomes a dangerous weapon against LGBT people.
They also don't care when their app facilitates harassment and puts innocent people at risk[2], and they're willing to go to the Supreme Court[3] in order to defend their right to do absolutely nothing about it.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/grindr-promises-privacy-still-...
[2] https://www.lawfareblog.com/herrick-v-grindr-why-section-230...
[3] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/publicati...
> By the time Matthew arrived at my office, exhausted and traumatized, he had already gotten an order of protection and reported the matter to the police 10 times. Yet, the flow of strangers—over a thousand at that point—wasn’t slowing. The unwitting strangers would wait for him in the stairwells at home, other times following him into the bathroom at work. “What about Grindr?” I asked. “They’re in the exclusive position to help.” Matthew said he had reported the matter to them 50 times.
If I ran a dating site, I'd jump all over this. Sure it's the right thing to do, but even from a business perspective having your platform appear to be a safe place would be important for gaining new members. If this account is remotely accurate I can't think of an explanation for this other than colossal incompetence or evil.
Many apps try to block it, but that's whack-a-mole.
Other dating sites I have used allow this technology so you can find dates for holidays, or at home while you're away. I assume that's the reason, it could just be so that people in relationships can cast their net further afield, but that's also pure speculation.
Exposed and other tools make it difficult for apps to lock down any aspect of trust on a phone, returning control to the owner of the device. Sometimes this isn't the most desirable thing, but it's never the wrong thing.
The FBI made fake anonymous phones. No reason an anti-LGBT organization or government couldn't make a Gay Dating app.
Remember that Grindr is majority owned by Beijing Kunlun Tech, a Chinese company. And China isn't the most Gay-friendly nation now is it...
Why would they? Doing that would make their data less valuable. Just because grindr is the "gay hookup app" doesn't necessarily mean that the people who operate it care about gay people's (or anyone's) privacy. According to this [0], grindr ranks #4 of all mobile apps when it comes to collecting personal information. It's a free app that requires your location to use it, which means that it's a personal info collection app first, and a dating app second.
[0]: https://www.komando.com/security-privacy/data-grabbing-apps/...
they do, if you pay them money for it. it's a "premium feature."
Smart phones are unpredictable in their danger. You would not expect Grindr to sell you out to an oppressive regime, for example. Nor would you expect your private dating profile to get you fired. These are unpredictable outcomes well outside the range of what most users would expect.
0 - Truly accidental discharges where the firearm goes off without a trigger press are rare and make the news. Most negligent discharges are the result of people mishandling the firearm, rather than the firearm doing something unexpected.
I think the mistake is thinking those profiles are private. How could you ever meet someone without some ability for people to see your profile? I've never tried any dating sites, so may be overlooking something obvious to others.
Never type anything you wouldn't want to be taken out of context and read out in court, either a law court, or the court of public opinion.
1) That’s not what people expect.
2) There is an argument that it shouldn’t be this way.
https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/07/21/news/voghera_as...
It seems like a moot distinction to me. Take Glock for example; they make a big deal about their guns having "three automatic independently-operating mechanical safeties." But the fact of the matter is a glock has no traditional fire/safe toggle safety. ALL the safety of a glock is based on the premise that the trigger will not be unintentionally pulled when a round is in the chamber. The obvious consequence of this is people getting shot by completely accidental trigger pulls. Whether you drop the gun and it goes off or the trigger snags on your clothing and the gun goes off, a gunshot accident is still a gunshot accident, and both are consequences of the gun's design.
That being said the first generation was prone to slam fires, where chambering a round sets the firearm off. Now that is an unpredictable tool.
Also, historically snagging the trigger on clothing has always been a source of negligent discharges, even before Gaston Glock was around. The allied army in WW2 officially required that most soldiers issued a handgun carry it with an empty chamber due to the prevalence of injuries, and the M1911 has a grip and manual safety.
> Glocks are still not unpredictable by my metric. [...] it’s not going to go bang without a trigger press. It’s a very predictable firearm in that way.
I agree with this completely. Glocks are predictable. Where we part ways is that I don't believe predictability is the metric that should be optimized for. People not getting shot is the important metric; predictability is only important insofar as it relates to that. But as demonstrated by glocks, predictability is not the end-all-be-all when it comes to people not accidentally shooting themselves.
As for soldiers in WWII, they also had piss-poor to non-existent trigger discipline. A 1911 is a safer gun than a glock due to the manual safety, but still won't protect you from handling it in unsafe ways. Glocks have that same problem, but worse because they lack manual safeties which function as one last line of defense when you fuck up everything else.
Here in the US guns need to pass a drop test before being legally available for sale. I’m sure Europe has similar restrictions.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/d...
If you want to go to gay bars and pick up guys on Grindr, leave the priesthood. If you want to be celibate and follow church teachings, quit going to gay bars. But, there’s nothing ‘courageous’ about trying to have your cake and eat it too.
My comment was about using the term ‘courageous.’
The use of that term is just knee-jerk virtue signaling merely because it involved a gay guy.
Priests are to be celibate. If you don’t like the rules, don’t be a priest.
If it was a priest who got caught having sex with women he met on tinder and going to strip clubs, nobody would call him ‘courageous.’ They’d call him a bad priest... there’s nothing admirable about it.
But replace ‘tinder’ with ‘Grindr’ and ‘strip club’ with ‘gay bar’ and the dipshit priest is suddenly ‘courageous’?
Are adulterers ‘courageous’ for breaking their vows and cheating on their spouse?
But, they have certain rules they are to follow if they wish to be a priest. If you swear to follow the rules, you should do so. If not, quit. It had nothing to do with Catholicism. If you’re a Rabbi leading a synagogue you shouldn’t sneak off on the Sabbath and gorge on pork sandwiches. Nobody would call such a Rabbi ‘courageous.’ They’d call him a hypocrite.
Hell, it doesn’t even have to do with religion. If your job prohibits you from smoking marijuana, and you swear you won’t, nobody should call you ‘courageous’ if you’re busted smoking weed.
Essentially, everything here has been legal. Is doxing illegal?
Even if these people had used a hacked data dump, did they do anything illegal?
Putting a pin in the app selling this data being morally/legally right/wrong, let's talk about people publicly putting their personal information on a site/app that is designed to use that data to connect you with another like minded person. Even if the app/site does not share that data, would it be legally wrong for the matched person to recognize and then do the outting? I get the desire to connect with someone might be very strong, but when you have this much to lose by being outted, you'd think the risk would be too great to actually follow through. Again, I'm not a millenial or newer, so all of thse types of apps/sites are just so different from how I think. <shrugs>
Because there is no law preventing it.
>why are companies allowed to just offer it?
Because these users did just offer it to a stranger. That's what is so confusing to me. Users claim they would not offer this info to a stranger, yet they gladly post it on social. Maybe there's still confusion on how private settings do/don't work??? Maybe people just are not capable of understanding the difference of the stranger/social post??? Maybe they don't really care, and are only saying they wouldn't give info to a stranger because they don't understand/like the question, and just answer how they think the questioner wants to hear?
Before the web, a phonebook was mainly a local thing: you could look somebody up in your area, but you couldn't easily look up somebody across the country. You'd have to dial directory assistance in that other area, and even then, you're only getting a few names that way.
With the web, everything is online and accessible using a simple lookup from a device in your pocket. You can also automate the acquisition and processing of entire phone directories with ease: going through the entire phonebook to annotate profiles on people would have taken weeks with paper, but you can do it in seconds with a Python script.
Indexing and rapid data processing fundamentally changes the character of datasets, both in terms of positive utility and in terms of potential misuses. We still haven't figured that out yet as a society.
Right, but you still can't easily look somebody up across the country - unless you pay for access to that data - which you could've done with phonebooks.
I strongly suspect that Bell sold their phonebook data to companies, but even if they didn't, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to obtain phonebooks from all the areas your business is interested in...
Sure you can, all the phone directories are online and aggregated now - for example: https://www.whitepages.com/
> I strongly suspect that Bell sold their phonebook data to companies, but even if they didn't, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to obtain phonebooks from all the areas your business is interested in...
Yes, but there's a lot more effort involved with (1) ordering a phone book from Bell for a city located on the other side of the country, and (2) looking up the persons of interest in the paper directory.
I wouldn't be suprised either if Bell sold phonebook data in the pre-internet age, but that's still a larger barrier to entry than somebody who can search for anything they want to know about somebody using a laptop in coffee shop. We've democratized open source intelligence to the point where the barrier to entry is a bored teenager that doesn't even need to leave their house. I don't think we've figured out the massive societal implications of that just yet.
I never said that it wasn't possible now. All I said was that it was just as possible then. You really think that ordering something by mail was a barrier to entry at a time when everything which could not be obtained locally was ordered by mail?
Further selling ad space in a book filled with other peoples information and those people who are the unwilling product get nothing but spam calls in return? Seems pretty gross if you ask me.
You could easily opt out of being listed in the phone book, and many people did.
When mobile phones started up (back in the ten digit days) you could call a cellular provider and query a number if you had a name. The STD (yes, yes, laugh at the STI joke) prefix used to signal the network the user was on so you could ask Orange for "John Smith" if the number started 0973.
This was also free to opt out of.
That doesn't pass any smell test.
I had a friend that allowed his number to be listed on an alias of David King so that in the book it showed up as King, David. It amused him.
I do agree that an opt-out-required phonebook sounds crazy now, but it didn't back in the 80s and 90s. Mass data collection was not the norm, and all that information wasn't available in digitized form to any person or company who wanted it. So abuse of that data was pretty low.
I agree that phone book data seemed just annoying at the time, but in hindsight it was a bad idea to normalize letting other people sell your data. Just look where we are now - I imagine a society more privacy focused when it was just annoying might not end up in a surveillance state quite so quickly.
Hindsight 20/20 and all, so I'm just looking at the past through todays lens and wondering if the modest (at best) convenience was worth the normalization of letting other people sell our data.
You could sue for compensatory damages: Loss of reputation, shame and hurt feelings, damage to the plaintiff’s trade or occupation, or loss of business income resulting from the disclosure.
(Link to source: https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/personal-injury/harm-to-reputat...)
The dating app example probably fails count 3, since one's dating life is not offensive to the average person. For grindr, it might be offensive to some minority of people.
2) The last point - which must be present, thanks to the word “and” - seems to imply that publishing facts you have good reason to believe are true would be excluded.
In his CNA article, Bermudez wrote that the group that approached him had wanted “to provide this information privately to Church officials in the hopes that they would discipline or remove those found to be using these technologies to violate their clerical vows and possibly bring scandal to the Church.”
in a tweet saying that he and his co-author had weighed the question of individual privacy and decided that Burrill’s Grindr use was a matter of public interest because he was a “high-ranking public figure who was responsible in a direct way for the development and oversight of policies addressing clerical accountability with regard to the Church’s approach to sexual morality.”
There's the answer to your public concern from their view point. Whether you agree with it or not, that is their stance.
Furthermore, these exceptions to privacy are very rarely limited to use against the rich and powerful. Today we’re excusing Grindr violating the privacy of the priest, tomorrow we find out that this loophole has been expanded to the poor and powerless.
Rights have to be extended to those you find distasteful, otherwise they don’t exist at all.
All I was trying to convey was this had nothing to do with his sexual orientation like you said. His actions on the otherhand are of public concern for Catholics.
> That is a public concern (at least to the Catholic public).
The reason why I came to that conclusion is because you said it clearly.
For example, a politician being a murderer would be of public concern, but that doesn't mean we should be tracking and invading the privacy of every politician on the off chance they are a murderer.
Secondly, I do not believe that a priest’s sexual orientation is a matter of public concern. It might be an interest of the parish, but the parish is not the public and the state is not obligated to treat it specially.
That is all I said. You jumped to the conclusion I was implying something I didn't say. You need to be more cautious about properly interpreting other's speech.
The fact your are continuing to claim that this had to do with sexual orientation in this post indicates you don't understand what I was saying. The reason this exploded is not because he is gay. There are a lot of gay priests.
The next issue is this priest was not just a regular diocesan priest. He was a very prominent priest who was part of the United States bishop's conference. He held a role in misconduct investigations. This makes it a very public (US wide) not just a parish / diocese issue.
I am not sure why you are bringing up the state. It makes no sense in any context of what we are talking about. I haven't said anything about the state or legality of this issue.
Because this thread was about whether this creates a tort or not, that’s why mentioning the state is relevant. I’m genuinely confused why you’re confused by this.
It’s right there at the top. I’m actually kind of alarmed that you can’t see that.
Either way, I think you're right - nothing in here seems explicitly illegal.
That’s the problem!
Now if it should be illegal is a tricky one. I think dating "apps" have changed things drastically from dating "websites" of old, because the websites made it obvious that anyone can sign up and find you. The originals anyone could find you without even signing up. The apps try to hide this, which gives a false illusion of privacy. Then at the same time they're requesting more and more information, some of which may not be obvious to the user.
So I guess I think the real fault lies with these apps for not making it obvious to their users that they are making this information public.
I think that's understood. Grindr was actually sold to a Chinese company, and the sale was reversed for that reason: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-grindr-m-a-investors-excl...
Hopefully this will lead to some legislative action against data brokers. If privacy rights in and of themselves weren't able to dislodge legislators from their pro-business bias, maybe national security concerns will.
Write your representatives: data brokers are agents for Chinese intelligence.
This is - alas - absolutely not just theory.
Why I don't agree with it? - Because I don't care what anyone does as long as it doesn't negatively affect anyone/anything else. I just don't have time to care about other people's shit as I have enough of my own shit to worry about.
It's in a different bracket? - Because in the USofA, religions are put in a separate bracket. That's how it was founded.
Religions get to do things others can't? - Because SCOTUS has decided that churches get to ignore certain protections of protected classes because of their religious dogma. They have spoken, so that's how it is.
In the past, people used their religions to oppose things like interracial relationships, and even judges[1] in the US would use religion to defend discrimination against interracial couples.
Turns out that people don't get to use religion to discriminate[2]:
> Instances of institutions and individuals claiming a right to discriminate in the name of religion are not new. In the 1960s, we saw objections to laws requiring integration in restaurants because of sincerely held beliefs that God wanted the races to be separate. We saw religiously affiliated universities refuse to admit students who engaged in interracial dating. In those cases, we recognized that requiring integration was not about violating religious liberty; it was about ensuring fairness. It is no different today.
[1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=55...
[2] https://www.aclu.org/issues/religious-liberty/using-religion...
I guess the difference here is that the priest thought he was not doing so publicly, though on the other hand he was going against clearly stated requirements, which is not reliably true in the other case. But hopefully everyone on this site is well enough aware that anonymity is a myth in far more anonymous settings than ones where you provide demographics, photos, self description, and your location (I presume, if grindr is anything like other dating platforms I've seen.)
In Catholic teaching forgiveness does not mean there isn't just punishment due, or that prudential decisions need to be made. An embezzler may be truly sorry but keeping them in a position where they control money would be bad for a variety of reasons (such as putting them in a near occasion of sin). In catholic Theology even those sins which are forgiven still require cleansing due to retained attachment to sin after death, this punishment / purification is called purgation and occurs in purgatory.
Hypocrisy is a central tenet of the US Republican platform.
"Laws for thee but not for me" is a cornerstone of their belief system.
I've become pretty cynical at this point to the endless stream of privacy issues but even I found this part shocking. Even extremely private health conditions were shared with 3rd-party advertisers? And they thought anonymizing a few attributes was good enough protections while including timestamped GPS locations?
This ranks up there with the worst of them...
Not solely for the purposes of out-ing people. Grindr messages are, well, I’ve seen things, man. It’s one thing to get outed—it’s another to get your scandalous message history splashed across the internet as well. The blackmail potential is huge.
It's not like you telling me to stop using an app that allows me to do something illegal. You're litterally telling someone to don't be a certain sexual orientation just because the current segment of socialtal beliefs doesn't like it. It doesn't work that way.
There's 1000s of things people could potentially get blackmailed for by bad actors. Not just sexual behavior. Brushing that aside like it's a non-issue show lack of maturity.
For example, there are some religious schools that require you to agree to certain living standards in order to attend (such as Biola, BYU, etc.). For example, no premarital sex, no drugs, etc (rules depends on religion and institution).
Say you attend such a school and decide to break the agreement you signed and go to a party and do drugs and have sex, etc. Then, at the party, you get raped. So, you report the rape to the police and during the investigation into the crime the university discovers you were at the party breaking the agreement you signed. Does the university have a right to terminate your membership at the institution based on information it got from a police report?
If you can remove a student for not being vaccinated, you can remove a student for violating your code of conduct.
You may as well go to their church then complain when they shun you. It's self-inflicted. Don't go to their dumb church and don't go to their dumb school either.
I would have thought the market would be huge.
But when you install applications on your phone which mishandle your data or even sell it -- it doesn't matter how secure your phone is.
The problem is the business culture and legal environment of software development. It's profitable and often legal to abuse data.
If the app is free so the selling of the data is the number one source of income, then as "enlightened" technerds we shouldn't be too surprised this can happen. However, it's not illegal. Is it the selling of user data collected by your service the thing that needs to be made illegal? How would that even work?
Grindr requires GPS.
On a 'properly secure' smartphone, you enable location access to use Grindr... or you don't use Grindr.
The user remains the insecure link in the chain here regardless of how 'properly secure' the smartphone is.
Grid-snapping GPS locations are the way other dating apps happen to do this kind of thing (tracking only to the nearest 1KM, for example, or in dense cities maybe 500M). Two permissions like "GPS (Nearby)" and "GPS (Exact)" could do this at the OS level rather than relying on applications to do the right thing.
Navigation apps likely need very fine resolution but dating apps, shopping apps, browsers, etc. could snap to a predefined intersection point on a grid. The OS could even allow the decision to be in the hands of the device owner - a simple dialogue when prompted for GPS permission to pick one of Exact, Nearby, Deny could handle it.
Let's take a food analogy: The Catholic church has the equivalent viewpoint of "Anyone who likes pizza more than hamburgers is wrong and has no place here". My viewpoint is "Binge eating disorders are bad and you should seek professional help if you have that disorder".