VICE – July 22 – For years, security and privacy researchers found serious vulnerabilities in Grindr, allowing them to deanonymize and geolocate users. This week, a Catholic Substack publication said it observed the movements of a priest through his use of the gay dating app Grindr. The publication then outed him without his consent, in a stark reminder that supposedly anonymized app location data can be used to identify and harass people. "Grindr has been, will be, and forever continues to be warned about this. They obviously don't care," said Matt Mitchell, a privacy and cybersecurity researcher. In 2019, a security researcher at Pen Test Partners, a cybersecurity firm in the UK, showed that he was able to "precisely locate and track the users of four major dating apps," including Grindr. "By supplying spoofed locations (latitude and longitude) it is possible to retrieve the distances to these profiles from multiple points, and then triangulate or trilaterate the data to return the precise location of that person," Alex Lomas, the Pen Test Partners researcher, wrote at the time.
by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
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