A gay man who claims his HIV positive status was misused by the dating app Grindr has accused the tech platform of treating his personal medical data like “a piece of meat”.
The man is one of nearly 1,300 people who have joined a civil lawsuit against the US-owned company in the UK high court that alleges the misuse of private information of Grindr users, including details about their HIV status and when they took their last test.
The class action claim seeking compensation and damages accuses Grindr of a breach of UK data protection laws for sharing sensitive data to third parties for commercial purposes without the users’ consent. Grindr denies it sold or shared user-reported health information, including HIV status, for advertising purposes.
The man, who must remain anonymous for legal reasons, claims he was targeted with adverts for HIV therapies on the platform and other social media outlets after confiding his status. “I was really upset,” he said. “Grindr is a gay institution.”
The claim is being coordinated by the City of London law firm Austen Hays, which says information about Grindr users’ ethnicity and data relating to their sex life and sexual orientation may have also been shared.
In 2021, the Norwegian data protection authority fined Grindr E6.5m for disclosing user data to third parties for marketing purposes without a legal basis.
The lawyer leading the UK claim, Chaya Hanoomanjee, said the claimants had experienced “significant distress” and suffered “fear, embarrassment and anxiety as a result”.
The user told the Guardian he met his husband on Grindr. He had considered the launch of the app in 2009 “a big thing for the gay community”.
“We used to have to put adverts in the papers, but when Grindr came out, it was just immediate,” he said. “It was amazing for young gay boys at that time. I didn’t have to go to the pubs and bars any more, because I always felt out of place there … nursing a pint and putting yourself on the market.”
He said it was important to be honest on the platform about HIV status so that other users could take precautions to avoid infection, but was “upset” when he started to see adverts on his online feeds tailored to HIV treatments.
“I thought, ‘I guess your phone just listens to you,’” he said. “I didn’t think it was from the company itself. You wouldn’t expect that. I’m not ashamed of my status, but I didn’t expect Grindr to go and sell it on like a piece of meat. It’s not their business. It’s my life.
“I feel really upset for a lot of people who haven’t been able to be as free [with their sexuality] as I have. There are a lot of men who have got wives and they’ve got kids.”
A spokesperson for Grindr said: “Grindr has never sold or shared user-reported health information, including HIV status, for advertising purposes, as is inaccurately suggested in this legal claim.
“As we will demonstrate in our response, this claim is based on a fundamental mischaracterisation of practices from more than four years ago, prior to early 2020. Users in this case appear to have been misled by this mischaracterisation, which is a matter of regret, and we remain committed to protecting our users’ data and complying with all applicable data privacy regulations.”
Hanoomanje said: “The core of our clients’ claim is that sensitive information that they trusted Grindr with was shared without their consent. Whilst Grindr says the data was not shared for advertising purposes, our clients want to understand why it was shared at all. Our clients have to be compensated even if that was only a historic practice as it has affected them and their lives massively.”
