Reports Say U.S. Sees A National Security Threat In Chinese Company Owning Grindr

Meet Market is an online dating website for gay and bisexual men and those who identify as men. Meet Positives makes dating easy and fun for positive LGBT singles. Grindr , the popular dating app for gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, looks like it might be changing hands again, a year after it was acquired at a valuation of $245 million. Grindr is based in West Hollywood and has more than 27 million users, including 3.3 million daily users. Prejudicial language has flourished on Grindr since its earliest days, with explicit and derogatory declarations such as no Asians,” no blacks,” no fatties,” no femmes,” no trannies” and masc4masc” commonly appearing in user profiles.

Not all Grindr users are addicted and depressed, of course. Finding the right site to meet gay singles can be a challenge. Indeed, a decade after their launch, Grindr, Scruff, and other apps have become critical tools for building queer community in rural places where gay bars largely don’t exist. Betancourt quickly learned he needed to take precautionary steps to stay safe and avoid phishing scams — going as far as asking some guys to write a specific word on a piece of paper and then take a picture of themselves posing with it. It’s not an ideal way of meeting a potential match, which is why he opts more often to use OkCupid, Tinder and Chappy, a newer dating platform for queer men that’s backed by Bumble.

For nearly a decade, Grindr resisted doing anything about it. Founder Joel Simkhai told the New York Times in 2014 that he never intended to shift a culture ,” even as other gay dating apps such as Hornet made clear in their communities guidelines that such language would not be tolerated. And the U.S. has banned the government use of gear from Chinese infrastructure giants Huawei and ZTE on the basis of security concerns. While there are a lot of gay dating sites for men seeking men out there, not all of them cater to those guys who are seriously searching for a lasting relationship.

Perhaps Grindr’s users will feel reassured by the company’s public commitment to their privacy, but a look at the fine print reveals that Grindr reserves the right to disclose their personal data to comply with relevant laws ”, and that the application of foreign laws may leave users without a legal remedy in the event of a privacy breach”. While the common dating ‘rules’ – not that I believe in rules – can apply to anybody, there are perhaps a few things we, as gay guys, need to pay a little more attention to.

Spence dropped hints that he was in the market for a media company, wowing staffers with his industry knowledge and personal interest in them. There’s no gay dating online unless you have a strong and super attractive profile. Premium users can see who’s online now and who’s liked their profile, have access to unlimited swipes, and even rewind on users they’ve already passed up. Users in less metropolitan areas may feel the app offers limited dating options, though the app continues to grow. Personal data has emerged as a mainstream concern of CFIUS,” Waite said.

Gay guys face that problem from time to time, and it can only be solved with honest communication. The company, which had 27 million users on its platform as of 2017, last year was discovered to have shared users’ HIV status and sexual preferences with third parties. Thousands of users complained that the app stopped working and wouldn’t refresh with new content. Of course, Grindr didn’t invent such discriminatory expressions, but the app did enable their spread by allowing users to write virtually whatever they wanted in their profiles.

These four gay men of different “Tribes” meet via the medium of the Grindr app, each seeking a different type of connection. Kunlun, the Chinese mobile company that owns Grindr , has to sell the popular gay-dating app by the middle of next year. This is potentially a powerful recipe for addiction and may explain why one user I spoke with stays on Grindr for up to 10 hours at a time, hoping to find the perfect partner for casual sex. After all, the illicit sexual tension that hangs in the air of a gay bar can’t be replicated online and doesn’t quite translate to its heterosexual counterpart.

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