Does Grindr & apps have a right sell and tell gay data to the Church or Government?

[brnbk]

 

Recent repots indicate that gay apps mainly Grindr, has been selling usage data of catholic priests/seminaries to the church. How can 'gay' organizations be so unethical and cruel. 

Grindr has had a reputation of anti-Asian racism since its early days and was later infamous for being the choice of drug dealers, but selling gay priests' data to the US church - and government as there is a new found brotherhood between the US Evangelicals and Catholics, is a new low. 

How do these gay companies function in the US and why do they get away with such behaviours?

 

Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, Jack'd, OkCupid sold gay app usage data to the catholic 'Church'- Washington Post

[RubberAustria]

„selling usage data of catholic priests/seminaries to the church“. But how do they know who is one of the priests/seminaries? Anyway here in Europe the church (Catholics? Protestants?) is full of gays. If you are near the Vatican for instance and open scruff/Grindr/gayromeo/ recon…..HOLY shit…. tons of profiles. Tons of BB sluts. 

[brnbk]

[think before following links] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/09/catholics-gay-priests-grindr-data-bishops/

[ErosWired]

50 minutes ago, RubberAustria said:

If you are near the Vatican for instance and open scruff/Grindr/gayromeo/ recon…..HOLY shit….

Well… near the Vatican, what other kind of shit would it be?

[ErosWired]

1 hour ago, brnbk said:

How do these gay companies function in the US and why do they get away with such behaviours?

They get away with it in the US because the market for brokering collected user data is - still - largely unregulated. Grindr was in fact fined $7.7 million dollars in 2021 for sale of sensitive user data between 2018 and 2020, but the fine was levied not by an American court, but by a Norwegian court under the EU’s GDPR laws. We do not have the same protections in the US because in America the Right To Make As Much Money As Possible essentially trumps every other right when it gets down to politics.

A right to privacy of personal information is not verbatim protected by our Constitution, which is why we do not have robust laws to protect it, and why we’re scrambling now that the internet has suddenly put us all under a public magnifying glass. I have no idea whether, or how, we end up having out cake and eating it too - getting all the benefits of distributed information tailored to our individual data, and keeping it completely secure from every possible adverse use.

[funpozbottom]

One thing religious organizations are good at is: being deceptive. While I wouldn't hold the sites completely "blameless", it's possible they didn't know who was buying the data.  I couldn't  read the article you linked since it's behind a subscriber wall, but the first line says the money was funneled through a 501c3, which could have obscured the buyers and their intent. Also the data could have been sold through a data broker, so again, the sites wouldn't have known who was buying it. (If anyone can read the article and confirm the sites knowingly sold data to religious organizations, I'll stand corrected.)

What bothers me more than adult sites selling data is that religious organizations have millions of tax free dollars available to spend on it. It would seem to me that if they were serious about their mission, they could find better uses for that money.

[BootmanLA]

To clarify a bit about this story:

The app companies weren't exactly selling their data to "the Church". Rather, a group of rich conservative Catholics bought the data from these companies - which is something anyone with deep enough pockets can do. Then they set some very sophisticated programs to work analyzing the data. Because the app data is geolocated, they were able to track profiles associated with phones that, say, were detected at both gay bars or bathhouses and at Catholic parish rectories. You do enough of that kind of analysis, linked to profiles on the sites, and you can sometimes zero in on the identity of the person involved.

Once they identified individuals as priests, this group - again, not the Church, but a private organization of rich Catholic people - took the evidence to the priests' bishop(s). So the Church itself didn't pay for anything.

As ErosWired noted, this is perfectly legal in the United States because when you sign up for most apps and services, the Terms of Service spell out that you give the company permission to use the data generated by your usage however they see fit. In some jurisdictions like the European Union, those TOS cannot supersede established legal privacy rights; but in the United States, users have virtually no such rights, with some very limited exceptions (like payment methods - credit card numbers and the like). And even if the company initially says it won't use X or Y or Z data, or it will only use A or B or C data, the TOS almost always gives the company the right to change that policy with little or no warning, other than a message that says the TOS has changed, click here to read the new version (and no one ever does because it's tens of pages of legal jargon).

Now, that doesn't make it morally right to do - but then morals are famously in the eye of the beholder. 

[rPup]

They must tread lightly and carefully with this kind of activity going forward. The constitution of California does protect the right to privacy, and this sort of activity is illegal under the CPRA if the user has opted out.

If a California resident has opted out of having their data shared, this would be a blatant violation of the rights afforded to them by the California Privacy Rights Act, which is now fully in force.

The Act, which was formerly known as California Proposition 24 (2020) specifies the types of information that we can block businesses from sharing, including everything from health, genetics, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sex life, union membership, religion, philosophical beliefs, and also precise geolocation data. 

This law expanded the previous law, and went into effect on January 1, 2023, applying to personal data collected on or after January 1, 2022. The intentions of the Act, according to Wikipedia (because I am lazy) are to provide California residents with the right to:

Know who is collecting their and their children's personal information, how it is being used, and to whom it is disclosed.

Control the use of their personal information, including limiting the use of their sensitive personal information.

Have access to their personal information and the ability to correct, delete, and transfer their personal information.

Exercise their privacy rights through easily accessible self-serve tools.

Exercise their privacy rights without being penalized.

Hold businesses accountable for failing to take reasonable information security precautions.

Benefit from businesses' use of their personal information.

Have their privacy interests protected even as employees and independent contractors.

California residents, take advantage of your CPRA rights!

I routinely request that companies that track me, data brokers such as LexisNexis, and advertisers delete all of my personal information.

[Theo8]

On 3/11/2023 at 6:38 PM, ErosWired said:

Well… near the Vatican, what other kind of shit would it be?

I refuse to laugh at that no matter how funny I find it

[ErosWired]

5 hours ago, Theo8 said:

I refuse to laugh at that no matter how funny I find it

You thought about laughing about it, though. That’s still a trip to the confessional.

[brnbk]

On 3/12/2023 at 8:16 PM, BootmanLA said:

To clarify a bit about this story: ........................................

Now, that doesn't make it morally right to do - but then morals are famously in the eye of the beholder. 

To me, it sounds like I went to a gay bar and the owner decided to inform a data collector  who turns out is a a local police informant who helps them build a database of who was frequenting a gay bar. While in todays world( pre Covid), it would seem rather harmless, if the police got to know if you went to a gay bar, 20 yrs ago in many part of the world, it could have gotten you into some very serious jeopardy.

No one in the gay world would fail to see the homophobia and dangers in the situation I described but somehow there is a reluctance to see the inherent danger to gay folks, in the sale of data by gay apps.   

Anyone who does research has to abide by ethical standards or else there is always a danger of falling into 'Nazi science'. These apps have no business outing gay priests when most gay priests in the catholic church are trying to reform it from within.

Since gay apps do business with gay customers, they have a moral responsibility to the gay community and are answerable to it. 

[onlyraw]

I actually wanted to bite “all of the above”

because it is - it is unethical- but sadly legal- unless they agree with the user not to share the information- they have the right to make money however they can

so than it becomes a question of corporate culture- do they sell to anyone- or do they only sell to companies that sell cars, or lube ,or ….

or are the willing to be so greedy (and sadly most companies are) that they are willing to sell to anyone- even those parties who may have nefarious intentions towards the site’s users 

[BootmanLA]

On 3/22/2023 at 10:57 PM, brnbk said:

No one in the gay world would fail to see the homophobia and dangers in the situation I described but somehow there is a reluctance to see the inherent danger to gay folks, in the sale of data by gay apps.   

Anyone who does research has to abide by ethical standards or else there is always a danger of falling into 'Nazi science'. These apps have no business outing gay priests when most gay priests in the catholic church are trying to reform it from within.

Since gay apps do business with gay customers, they have a moral responsibility to the gay community and are answerable to it. 

I agree the danger is there. But here's the harsh, cold reality: if an app/service is free, the app isn't the product. YOU are. Advertisers will pay to have their ads targeted to app users who reside in certain areas or who frequent certain locations (not just sexual ads, but other products, too). If your phone is constantly contacting cell towers in the vicinity of a Whole Foods store, you're much more likely to see ads targeting higher income consumers than if you are constantly pinging towers near the Dollar General.

Beyond that, though, data brokers will buy data from the companies that collect it, and often those collecting companies have no idea what will be done with the data after it's purchased. Or the company that buys it may then resell it. Or they may lie about what they intend to use it for. The bottom line, though, is that a company like Grindr or Growlr or Scruff or whatever has to make money to pay for its servers, etc. and the premium, paying members don't carry the whole bill. Selling the data is what keeps these companies open for business.

And the companies that buy this information also buy other datasets, which they can combine. So if PhoneNumber XXXXX, associated with Grindr Profile AAAAAAA, is also in other datasets that show that phone number geolocates frequently to Bathhouse ZZZZZZ, and to church rectory YYYYYY, computers have a trivial task filtering and combining these different data sets to paint a pretty good picture of the life of a particular phone user.

And remember: none of us, really, EVER read the Terms and Conditions that apply when you click 'Agree' to use any app - whether it's a hookup app or a shopping app or anything else. They're all collecting data, and most of them sell that data, and somewhere big mainframes are crunching trillions upon trillions of bytes of data showing links between this, that, and the other thing. 

So again, it's not the APP that is outing the priests. It's the people who bought the data from the app. The only way out of it is not to use those kinds of apps in the first place.

[chipygmalion80]

On 3/24/2023 at 4:47 PM, BootmanLA said:

if an app/service is free, the app isn't the product. YOU are.

Yup.  That's a Public Service Announcement that should be shouted everywhere.

The Facebook - Cambridge Analytica fiasco prooved what many of us (especially in IT/Tech) have known -- that private data is $$$ so it's bought & sold all the time.

Even free forums, like this one, have to make $$$ somehow.  Occasionally, I will "donate" to forums, aka. upgrade to Premium.

If the question is: "what do we do about this?"  You'll hear a lot of stabs at it.  I recommend 1 uncommon thing:

Pay-to-Play. 

OK, not "pay-to-play" in the usual sense.  I mean seek out and use apps/forums/etc whose revenues are, at least partly, from paid subscribers; and then subscribe to them.  Substack is an recent example of revenue from paid subscribers.

"What's a good sniff test?" might be the next question.

A good indicator of how much revenue is coming from selling private data is looking at how targetted the ads are.  If ads are generic, like this site -- OK it's all BB porn but I've not seen that any ad actually knows _which_ BB porn that I like --, it's probably OK. If in-app ads seem to really, REALLY know you -- like the ad knows you just bought some Nike shoes yesterday, or knows that you just visited Chicago --, then your private data has been sold to 3rd parties.

If the sniff test fails, then get rid of the app/website/whatever.

And to be bearer of bad news -- all the social media apps must be removed.  Not just TikTok.  All. Of.  Them.  Not many folks are willing to remove all these apps, except Mr. Hermit whose off-grid already anyways 🙂

There are some methods to limit these apps ability to send private data (usually the app already has your data on your device and just needs to send it to servers), but these methods aren't simple to use, and often break the apps anyways.  Examples are: overseas VPNs, reverse Proxies, secure DNS, advanced Firewall apps, etc.

Edited March 28, 2023 by chipygmalion80
P.S.

[akula]

Fucking hypocrits check this article out.

[think before following links] https://www.salon.com/2013/03/12/the_vatican_plays_landlord_to_europes_biggest_gay_bathhouse/