Independent campaign. Not affiliated with Grindr LLC.
@deletegrindrOur community trusted one app with our location, our health status and the fact that we're queer. Regulators, courts and researchers have spent years documenting what happened next.
It's always a nice day to delete Grindr.
NOK 65M
GDPR fine from Norway's data protection authority, upheld on appeal in 2025
£26M
Paid to settle a UK claim by about 12,000 users over data sharing, including HIV status (no admission of liability)
9 years
Between Grindr's first and latest warnings to users in Egypt that police were posing as gay men (2014–2023)
01 — Privacy
2018-04
Norwegian research institute SINTEF found Grindr sending users' HIV status and last test date to two app-analytics vendors, Apptimize and Localytics. It also found GPS location, ethnicity, relationship status and other profile data going to advertising companies, some of it unencrypted. Grindr said it never sold the data and stopped sharing HIV status after the reports. [1] [2]
2019-05
Reuters reported that Grindr's then-owner, Beijing Kunlun Tech, had given engineers in Beijing access to Grindr's database for several months. The US government's foreign-investment committee (CFIUS), concerned the data could be used to target US military and intelligence personnel, ordered access restricted and then pushed Kunlun to sell the app. Reuters' sources said there was no evidence the data was misused. [18]
2020-10
A security researcher found that Grindr's password-reset page leaked reset tokens, so anyone who knew a user's email address could take over their account, including photos, messages and HIV status. Grindr fixed it after the flaw was publicized and said it believed no one had exploited it. [19]
2021-07
A Catholic publication bought "commercially available" app-signal data and used it to identify a senior priest as a Grindr user and track him to gay bars. He resigned the same day. Grindr said it did not believe it was the source of the data. The case showed how location data from ad networks can be traced back to one person. [3]
2021-12 → 2025-10
Norway's data protection authority fined Grindr NOK 65 million for sharing user data with advertisers without valid consent. Grindr appealed and lost before the Privacy Appeals Board (2023), the Oslo District Court (2024) and the Borgarting Court of Appeal (October 2025). The Oslo court held that simply being a registered Grindr user is information about a person's sexual orientation. [4] [5]
2026-09
About 12,000 UK users sued in the High Court, alleging Grindr shared sensitive data, including HIV status in some cases, with third parties before 2020. Grindr settled for £26 million without admitting liability. It disputes the allegations, acknowledges users' "distress and loss of trust", and says the practices date from its previous owner. The UK Information Commissioner's Office had earlier issued Grindr a reprimand for infringing UK GDPR. [6] [7]
Grindr says its privacy program has been overhauled since 2020 under new ownership. You can decide for yourself whether that's enough. [7]
02 — Safety
In 2014, after reports that Cairo police were posing as gay men on the app, Grindr warned all users in Egypt and switched off distance there. [15]
In 2017, after fans waved rainbow flags at a Mashrou' Leila concert, Egypt launched a crackdown. Human Rights Watch reported that one man arrested through dating-app entrapment, which it called a common police technique, was sentenced to six years in prison. [16]
In 2020, HRW documented police using fake profiles on apps including Grindr to arrest LGBT people, some of whom were then abused in detention. In 2023, Grindr again warned every user in Egypt about police entrapment. [11] [12]
Showing who's nearby is the point of the app. The problem is that researchers have repeatedly turned a vague "2 km away" into a precise spot by measuring from several points, a technique called trilateration. Synack located about 15,000 San Francisco users in 2015, and Pen Test Partners mapped users across London in 2019. In 2016, Kyoto University researchers showed users could be found even with distance switched off. [8] [9] [21]
Grindr itself treats its location features as risky in some places: it turned them off in the Olympic Village in Beijing (2022) and Paris (2024) to protect athletes who aren't out. [20]
In Dallas in 2017, a group used Grindr to lure gay men to an apartment, where they were held at gunpoint and robbed. Up to nine men were targeted. Four men were convicted, and three were sentenced in 2021 to between 11 and 22 years for hate crimes and related charges. [17]
In 2019, London's Metropolitan Police issued a safety warning to Grindr users after two people were arrested on suspicion of murder and thefts connected to the app. [9]
03 — Community
This campaign isn't against queer people, sex or dating. It's against a product that profits from our attention and our data while too many of us leave it feeling worse.
77%
of Grindr users in a 2018 survey of 200,000 iPhone users by Time Well Spent said the app left them unhappy, the highest share of any app in the survey. Users who reported unhappiness spent an hour or more a day on it. (Self-reported survey.) [13]
A 2019 University of Waterloo study in the journal Body Image found Grindr harmed users' body image through weight stigma, sexual objectification and comparison with others. It was a small exploratory study of 13 users, but it echoes what many of us have lived. [14]
A name for it
(n.) Being on Grindr while high: hours of scrolling, messaging and lining up the next hookup as part of a chemsex session.
We made up the term because the behaviour didn't have a name. If you've done it, you know what it looks like: the night that doesn't end because the grid never does.
Chemsex is sex under the influence of drugs such as crystal meth, GHB/GBL or mephedrone. Research across Europe, the UK and the US links it closely to dating apps. One study of 89 men who had chemsex, in Germany, found that dating apps play a key role in how sessions are organised. The harms the men described included sexually transmitted infections, overdoses, losing control over safer sex, and for some, finding sex without drugs hard to imagine. [22]
Reporting in 2026 cited the European MSM Internet Survey: 10–13% of gay and bisexual men in Western Europe said they had chemsex in the previous four weeks, up from 5% in 2017. In the US, over 10% of men who have sex with men reported using chemsex drugs in the past year. [24] Governments are starting to pay attention: in 2025, Germany's federal drugs commissioner warned chemsex is rising and called for it to be discussed without shame. [23]
Grindr's rules ban mentioning drugs, but the same reporting found users get around it with code words and emojis. Apps didn't invent chemsex, and health experts describe it more as a symptom of underlying struggles than a cause. But an app that's always open, always nearby and always showing someone new makes it easy to keep going. [24]
Our demands
Grindr makes money from advertising and subscriptions, so every hour someone spends chem scrolling is an hour of engagement. In our view, that comes with responsibility.
To be fair, Grindr's Help Center has a page on drugs, and its non-profit arm, Grindr for Equality, runs harm-reduction campaigns. [24] But in 2019, when chemsex expert Ignacio Labayen de Inza used a Grindr account to point users to drug advice, and more than 2,600 men contacted him, Grindr banned the account for breaching its community guidelines. He was reinstated only after four months of appeals. [25]
01
Support built into the app
Clear chemsex information and one-tap links to local LGBTQ+ health services in every country where Grindr operates.
02
Check-ins, not endless scrolling
Optional prompts after long late-night sessions, with an easy way to pause the app, the way many apps already offer screen-time tools.
03
Partner with outreach workers
Verified accounts for health and harm-reduction workers, so people offering help aren't banned for it.
04
Act on dealing, not on users
Serious enforcement against drug selling on the app, without punishing users who talk about drugs because they're looking for help.
05
Fund community services
Put money into independent chemsex counselling and testing services, especially outside big cities, where support is hardest to find.
06
Report publicly
Publish yearly figures on what Grindr spends on support, how many users it reaches, and how it handles drug-related reports.
04 — Take action
1
Get a copy of your data
Many privacy laws let you ask a company what it holds on you, including the GDPR in the EU and UK, and laws in California, Brazil and elsewhere.
2
Delete your account
Delete the account in the app's settings first. Uninstalling the app alone leaves your profile and data in place.
3
Request erasure
Ask in writing for all your personal data to be erased, citing your local privacy law if it gives you that right, and keep a record of the request.
4
Uninstall and share
Remove the app, then tell friends why. Use #DeleteGrindr, and never share anyone else's profile or identity.
sources