28
votes
Grindr fined 10% of their global annual revenue ($11.7 million) in Norway for sharing deeply personal information with advertisers, including location, sexual orientation and mental health details
Link information
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- Title
- Grindr fined £8.6m in Norway over sharing personal information
- Authors
- Alex Hern
- Published
- Jan 26 2021
- Word count
- 496 words
What “mental health” details are being sold? That’s most shocking to me. Sexual orientation is obvious, the users are gay. Location is a given, it’s a major part of the app’s interface. But mental health? Are they reading chat logs and deciding if someone is depressed that way? Fucking creeps me out.
The article offers no details but if I were to guess my money is on metrics related to how often you check/refresh the app etc. I would not be surprised if some of these platforms have ways to spot addictive personalities either to monetize themselves or sell to someone who will. Anyways, regardless of what mental health data their selling it's pretty disgusting to think a group of people discussed this and decided it was OK to monetize.
Especially when the clients are a group of people who are historically targeted for harassment and violence. I would assume most of the employees are in the groups targeted by the app, so it's not like they don't have life experience with this.
While I obviously understand why this is a major invasion of privacy, isn't this to be expected?
When the TOS of applications say something along the lines of "any information given to the app can be collected" shouldn't everyone assume that nothing is safe?
I would automatically assume any dating app is collecting all of this information for both marketing and statistical reasons.
Collecting, perhaps, but certainly not selling. Regardless of the terms of service, that happens to be illegal in some places. A ToS doesn't make companies immune to the law, no matter how much they'd like it to.
Expected from a US-based company, selling the data of their US users? Yep. Lawmakers here have chosen to take a very hands-off approach to regulation of consumer data (California being the major exception that I'm aware of).
I'm far from an expert, but my basic understanding of the GDPR is that it was meant to set a higher expectation of privacy, and to set it across the board for all EU citizens. That way they don't have to read the fine print of each individual app's terms & conditions in order to determine how much of their data will be sold and if they're OK with it.
Grindr is a US-based company, but by doing business in the EU they're obligated to follow those EU laws.
I'm surprised that it's out of global revenue, not just revenue earned from Norwegian users. Is Grindr HQed in Norway? (I thought they were US based IIRC) This feels like the flipside of a complaint I've heard about US tax law, that they tax incomes earned globally, not just in the US. How is fining on global revenue from a legal violation in one operating country any different?
I wonder if Grindr will just drop Norway entirely as a result of this. (Although I have to wonder how effective that'd be, seeing as how there's still users in staunchly anti-gay countries where I'm sure Grindr has no official sanction)
A penalty based on global revenue is one of the few tools available to smaller governments to make sure that a punishment feels significant enough to large businesses so they don't just accept as a cost of doing business without also crushing smaller businesses who also break the same law.
Assuming they do the same in the EU this is likely a violation of GDPR as well, so I don't think dropping norway is going to help them much. And if they don't do the same in EU then doing the same changes in norway is probably fairly easy.
I don't know about company ownership, but certainly their engineers are here. They give talks periodically about their tech stack and stuff like that.