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posted by chromas on Tuesday April 03 2018, @07:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the sharing-is-caring dept.

Grindr Admits It Shared HIV Status Of Users

The same-sex dating app Grindr responded Monday to revelations that it allowed third parties to view the HIV status of users, saying its customers had the option not to supply sensitive information. Grindr acknowledged that information on users' HIV status, including the date they were last tested for the virus, was shared with two companies – Apptimize and Localytics, who were paid to monitor and analyze how the app was being used.

News that the app was sharing the data first appeared in a story by Buzzfeed on Monday. Buzzfeed wrote: "Because the HIV information is sent together with users' GPS data, phone ID, and email, it could identify specific users and their HIV status, according to Antoine Pultier, a researcher at the Norwegian nonprofit SINTEF, which first identified the issue."

In a point-by-point response on its Tumblr page, Grindr said: "It's important to remember that Grindr is a public forum. We give users the option to post information about themselves including HIV status and last test date, and we make it clear in our privacy policy that if you choose to include this information in your profile, the information will also become public." Grindr also said that the information was encrypted and that the company "has never, nor will we ever sell personally identifiable user information – especially information regarding HIV status or last test date – to third parties or advertisers."

San Francisco's ABC7 spoke to Alec Nygard, a user of the app, who said it allows the option of posting "negative," "negative on PrEp," "positive," or "positive-undetected status."

Also at CNN, The Guardian, Bloomberg, and TechCrunch.

Related: Health Insurer Aetna Accidentally Exposes Customers' HIV Statuses With Transparent Envelope Windows


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  • (Score: 2) by rigrig on Tuesday April 03 2018, @10:20PM

    by rigrig (5129) Subscriber Badge <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Tuesday April 03 2018, @10:20PM (#662211) Homepage

    You don't need to actually read ToS to understand them, there are basically* two variants:
    1) "60 pages of legalese": somewhere in those 60 pages it tells you we will sell whatever data we can get our grubby hands on
    2) "Simple terms stating we won't sell your data": we're lying

    * Of course there are some exceptions, which usually have their policy hidden away on some obscure wiki page [soylentnews.org], don't really care about your data, and in fact would prefer you kept the private stuff to yourself (and might even make some effort to get rid of it, if you do insist on sharing it).

    --
    No one remembers the singer.
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