Years on, third party apps still exposing Grindr users’ locations

September 19th, 2018 By Lisa Vaas
 
Grindr, the premium gay dating app, is exposing the precise location of its more than 3.6 million active users, in addition to their body types, sexual preferences, relationship status, and HIV status…
 
…Still.
 
On Thursday, the gay community blog Queer Europe reported that after five years of controversy over the app’s oversharing of highly personal data – data that can put gay men at risk of being stalked or arrested and imprisoned by repressive governments – anybody can still obtain exact locations of millions of cruising men, in spite of what Grindr has recently claimed.
 
Grindr itself isn’t giving away that information. Rather, it’s coming from a free, third-party app – “**bleep**r” – that’s built on top of its API, without Grindr’s permission.
 
GitHub has been hosting **bleep**r’s repository since it was released in 2015. Shortly after Queer Europe’s post, GitHub shut it down, citing the unauthorized access to Grindr’s API as the reason.
 
But neutering **bleep**r didn’t negate the threat: as BuzzFeed News reported, as of Friday morning, there were still dozens of live forks – in other words, tweaks of the original app – out there:
 
Full Article.