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Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

>> For many years they were sending the private HIV status & sexual orientation information for millions of people to third party analytics in plain text

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding me?

Grindr must’ve been started by the gay community, yeah? Why the hell are we doing this to ourselves?!

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I got really pissed both times Facebook leaked my phone and email. Imagine being HIV positive and having that leaked. God, I can't even imagine. And I assume, as usual, that there is no decent victim compensation or punishment for the perpetrators. Heck, they surely get to keep all the dirty money too.

The silver lining here is finally an argument for privacy that has very little risk of being shut down as "hypothetical", which is always a dead end for most low-key privacy debates.

I do some commercial dance and when I started I began getting targeted ads for managing HIV, which would be enough to identity one of the small group of men I dance with as having HIV.

They haven't been owned by a gay person in years, AFAIK

The information in apps like Grindr is more sensitive than other apps (e.g. Tinder) but it's probable that most apps are selling, or have sold in the past, most user information that they can garner. What's the incentive to do it securely, or to provide proper anonymisation?

Did you do any research before posting this knee-jerk?

It got sold to a Chinese company afaik.

> Grindr must’ve been started by the gay community, yeah? Why the hell are we doing this to ourselves?!

That question is harder to answer if you adhere to identity politics and easy to answer if you apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Marxism

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