Grindr rolled out a number of enhanced privacy protections within the Olympic Village in Paris to protect LGBTQ athletes using the popular gay dating app.
Earlier this week, some Grindr users shared on social media that the app appeared to be blocked in the Olympic Village, because they couldn’t use the “explore” function, which allows users to search for and view profiles in a specific location, NBC News reported.
Then, on Wednesday, Grindr confirmed that it disabled the app’s location-based features, which it also did at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and rolled out a number of other enhanced privacy measures.
“If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them on the app,” Grindr said in a blog post.
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At least 67 countries have national laws criminalizing same-sex relations between consenting adults, according to Human Rights Watch.
Without the location-based services, Grindr users will not be able to use the app’s “explore,” “roam,” or “show distance” features in the Olympic Village. However, users can share their approximate distance if they decide to turn it on.
“Our goal is to help athletes connect without worrying about unintentionally revealing their whereabouts or being recognized,” Grinder said in its Wednesday post.
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Among its other additional safety features, the app will allow users in the Olympic Village to send unlimited disappearing messages and to unsend messages, regardless of whether they’re a premium or free user. It will also disable private videos within the Olympic Village and allow users to disable screenshots for profile images and direct messages, as well as send targeted safety resources and information such as weekly “messages reminding users that they may face danger while using the app in the Olympic Village and sharing links to our multilingual safety resources,” the blog post said.
Some social media users noted that Grindr has been used in the past to out Olympic athletes, alluding to one widely criticized article from the Daily Beast in which a reporter, who noted that he identified as heterosexual, used the app at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.
The original version of the article provided potentially identifying information about some of the athletes that the reporter “matched” with. After intense backlash, the Daily Beast edited the article to remove identifying information, but then eventually took down the article and replaced it with an editor’s note, which included an apology to “athletes who may have been inadvertently compromised by our story.”
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