Grindr, the app that introduced gay courtship rituals to smartphones, used to be known best for enabling hookups.
Its 2018 takeover by a Chinese firm, however, left the U.S. government worried that the change in ownership might allow America’s foreign adversaries to exploit the sometimes intimate details shared by 3.8 million active users a day, such as their sexual health, HIV status, and revealing photos, for geopolitical advantage.
“In the wrong hands, this information can be misused in ways that threaten the safety and well-being of LGBTQ users around the world,” Democratic Sens. Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal said in a statement. “These concerns are heightened when there is a risk of adversarial foreign actors being privy to the data in question.”
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an interagency panel led by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin that gauges whether overseas purchases of American companies pose national security risks, made the right decision in seeking to unwind the deal, the lawmakers said. The LGBTQ Task Force, a national advocacy group, didn’t return a message seeking comment.
The government’s move illustrates the growing concern over not only Chinese competition with the U.S., which prompted the committee to intervene in the proposed takeover of telecommunications supplier Qualcomm by Singapore-based Broadcom in March 2018, but mounting worries about how technology firms are employing and safeguarding data harvested from billions of users.
Support for a bill setting federal privacy standards has gained momentum after high-profile hacks such as the theft of identification data for more than 300 million people from Marriott Hotels’ Starwood division last year, as well as a breach at credit bureau Equifax in 2017 that exposed similar data for more than 145 million people.
Democrats who regained control of the House of Representatives raked Equifax and its rivals over the coals in a February hearing that examined a business model that collects and profits from consumer data while offering no compensation. And last weekend, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of social media giant Facebook, urged Congress to set federal standards in an op-ed published in the Washington Post and the Irish Independent.
A privacy law “should protect your right to choose how your information is used — while enabling companies to use information for safety purposes and to provide services,” he wrote. “And it should establish a way to hold companies such as Facebook accountable by imposing sanctions when we make mistakes.”
Adding intimate data to the privacy debate, as the Grindr case does, only raises the stakes.
Beijing Wanwei Kunlun Technology Co., which acquired a majority stake in Grindr in 2016 and purchased the remainder two years later, said in a filing with the China Securities Regulatory Commission that it’s in talks with U.S. officials but has yet to reach an agreement over the business, which has an annual operating income of $85.8 million.
A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment on the actions of the committee, commonly referred to as CFIUS. It’s the second time in less than a year that Grindr has drawn scrutiny from the U.S. government.
Markey and Blumenthal called the company out in a letter last year after news reports that it had shared HIV data entered by users with software firms helping to optimize the platform.
“This sensitive information could be misused if appropriate protections are not in place,” the senators wrote. “Simply using an app should not give companies a license to carelessly handle, use or share this type of sensitive information.”
The company’s chief technology officer, Scott Chen, said afterward that the data had been encrypted and that it was never sold to advertisers. “We respect each person’s decision whether to keep that information private,” he wrote in a blog post. “We know that enabling conversations about sexual health is as important as it is difficult.”
