The Daily Beast published an article earlier today (since taken down) of a non-gay Daily Beast writer at the Olympics creating a profile on Grinder then seeing what kind of bites he got. He got a bunch of Grinder bites then published thinly veiled descriptions of the responses he received which were (apparently) sufficiently detailed enough they would let a number of the athletes be identified and most of these athletes are not out.
What the writer did was juvenile and potentially dangerous for athletes in non gay accepting cultures, but I am surprised by the tone of much of the criticism which seems to be consider Grinder activity an almost sacred protected space that should be inviolate. I get that it was an exploitative stunt by the article writer, but when are posting pics of yourself on a publically accessible dating app effectively advertising your desire for a sexual hookup how much protected anonymity can you really expect?
It was a shitty thing to do, but viewing or sharing public profiles is not a privacy issue.
What the reporter should have done is write a piece illustrating how easy it is to get this information and teaching gay people from vulnerable regions how to be more careful.
When I put personal information up on a dating app, I’m not expecting privacy. I’m expecting my personal information to be visible to other uses of the dating app.
I’m not expecting it to be splashed across the newspapers, or otherwise brought to the attention of people who haven’t gone looking for it on the dating app. That’s fairly shitty behaviour, I would say, if done without my consent.
Which is it? Is it an exploitative act, or was the expectation unreasonable? It can’t be both. I don’t understand the point of the thread if you agree that a violation of privacy occurred.
And if you don’t think a violation occurred, which seems more probable given what you’re saying, why say “I get that it was… exploitative?”
I think the “lives at risk,” commentary is inflated. Posting on Grindr put their lives at risk. This journalist simply repeated a subset of what was already public.
I don’t think they are mutually exclusive concepts. What he did was exploitative but on the flipside if you are posting your personal details and picture on a site that takes almost zero effort to access and offers zero privacy, and in fact the point of it is to market yourself as publically as possible to people with a like a minded interest to hook up, and you cannot afford to be outed, what realistic expectation of protected privacy can you really have?
If you can’t have a realistic expectation of privacy, what was the exploitation? If the point is that in some different scenario where the outing happened differently, it might be less exploitative, well, sure. But nobody’s complaining about some different, less exploitative scenario, are they?
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I think the “lives at risk,” commentary is inflated. Posting on Grindr put their lives at risk. This journalist simply repeated a subset of what was already public.
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I’d have thought it could go without saying that a journalist has an audience that is not typically perusing Grindr, and one with a much higher likelihood of containing the sort of person that poses a safety risk to an outed gay athlete.
Perhaps not. All it would take would be to out one gay athlete who happened to be from one of the handful of countries where gays are executed. Similar things have happened.
“Reasonable expectation of privacy” is really about social norms and customs. In the real world, there’s a strong social norm against peeping into windows from places that might be publicly accessible but are not normally places where people are. E.g. you’ve got no expectation of privacy in front of a window that faces the street, but you’ve got a reasonable expectation of privacy in front of your bedroom window which is only visible if your neighbor installs a camera on a 10 ft pole on his roof.
Grindr (and social media in general) is just too new for there to be any universal social norms. I guess that a lot of users have some expectation of privacy, but it only takes a few assholes to violate that. The expectation of privacy probably makes more sense in the real world, in the small and tightly-knit local gay communities.