NBC NEWS – Apr 4 – The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an interagency group led by the Treasury Department that oversees foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies, began investigating Grindr in July 2018 because of concerns about the security of sensitive user data collected by the app, which included the HIV status. Grindr, which has ~3M daily users, was wholly acquired by China's Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. in Jan 2018. The deal immediately caused concern among national security experts who worried that China could harvest sensitive private data from the app for espionage purposes. Kunlun is now trying to sell Grindr under pressure from the Treasury's foreign investment committee over national security concerns. A spokesperson for Grindr declined to comment on the federal committee's investigation and said that the company "never disclosed any user data to the Chinese government nor do they intend to. Scott Chen was named Grindr's CTO shortly after the app's sale to Kunlun. He is currently president of Grindr. On July 3, 2018, Chen informed three Grindr employees that Yiming Shao, an HIV researcher for China's equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was interested in working with Grindr. To facilitate this project, Chen wrote an email to the employees that suggested putting a full-time "intern" in Grindr's West Hollywood, California, headquarters to do research and work on a paper about HIV prevention that would be co-published with the company. "They are attracted by our brand, reach and data," Chen wrote in the email. "We need to be extremely careful about their data request. Yiming is head of HIV prevention in China CDC. We can't let people say this is about 'sharing user data with the Chinese government." Company employees believed that putting a person from Shao's team in Grindr's headquarters would put user data at risk.
by Tim Fitzsimons
See full article at NBC News
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