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Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

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Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#231

Post by fbonetti »

jimmy1 wrote: post #230
rdtsc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. Combine this with the Chinese OPM hack, where extremely personal data for most government employees with security clearance has been stolen, and they have a blackmail goldmine on their hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... They can verify what has been reported on sf-86 vs what might be found from this service. Any affairs or issues not reported are ripe for blackmail. Possibil…

Why is this a blackmail goldmine? I am ignorant of Grindr, but what I have heard it is basically Tinder but for gay men. Would Tinder be blackmail data? It's hook ups and relationships, dating, etc, no?

You really can't imagine any scenario in which this information could be used for blackmail?

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#232

Post by macintux »

jimmy1 wrote: post #230
rdtsc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. Combine this with the Chinese OPM hack, where extremely personal data for most government employees with security clearance has been stolen, and they have a blackmail goldmine on their hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... They can verify what has been reported on sf-86 vs what might be found from this service. Any affairs or issues not reported are ripe for blackmail. Possibil…

Why is this a blackmail goldmine? I am ignorant of Grindr, but what I have heard it is basically Tinder but for gay men. Would Tinder be blackmail data? It's hook ups and relationships, dating, etc, no?

Being gay is still a sensitive subject in the U.S., moreso in many other parts of the world.

And I'd suspect that there are more than a few married (nominally heterosexual) men seeking out extramarital affairs on Grindr.

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#233

Post by mrkurt »

chimeracoder wrote: post #130
mrkurt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the distinction between "third party service" and "hosting company" is all that clear. You're sending data to a third party service when you host an app on AWS. The only data protection you have is contractual.

> You're sending data to a third party service when you host an app on AWS. Amazon neither receives nor requires access to the raw underlying data (in this case: data in your database indicating HIV status, or decrypted bodies of requests sent over TLS indicating same) when you host your web services on AWS. While, yes, it's possible for a dedicated attacker to intercept and snoop on this data, it's (a) not easy, and…

I honestly don't get the distinction you're making here. I understand how people _can_ use AWS without ever letting sensitive data touch their disks, but most apps hand everything over wholesale (and frequently in a nicely structured format on RDS).

The legal distinction you're making doesn't sound right to me. Contractors for companies that access your data aren't usually about whether or not an attacker can get at it, but about what kind of access an employee of the service itself has.

Amazon _technically_ has complete access to your data when you run on AWS, but they're contractually limited in how they can use it. The same goes for third party SaaS services. The major difference is "who writes the logic".

But I'm not a lawyer and won't ever have to argue that somewhere it matters.

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#234

Post by macintux »

johnchristopher wrote: post #50
overcast wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're going to pay to use it right? If this imaginary product managed to get 1% of Facebook to hand over their credit card. That would be the most wildly successful pay to use application in existence. Will never happen. Social Media sites rely on mass adoption, among those who refuse to pay for just about anything.

Just as some people pay for fastmail I am pretty sure there'd be some people paying an entrance fee to a social network. Wasn't the social network of last week, vero, supposed to be like that ?

Network effects are brutally hard to overcome.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/app-net-shut-down...

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#235

Post by josecastillo »

It might be worth making another post to highlight an additional concern: this repository itself appears to leak profile images of many Grindr users. The raw-data folder includes nearly 14,000 files, including many ads and scripts, but also thumbnails of many user profiles. This file[1] for example, once you strip out the HTTP headers, is a JPEG that shows the legs and gym socks of one user. This one [2] shows a user's bare torso.

I would link to others, but most of the ones that I've found include clear views of users' faces, sometimes clothed and sometimes shirtless. In some cases it looks like the photos were taken in their homes. It's ironic that in exposing Grindr's mishandling of users' personal data, this party appears to have mishandled personal data themselves.

[1]: https://github.com/SINTEF-9012/grindr-privacy-leaks/blob/mas...

[2]: https://github.com/SINTEF-9012/grindr-privacy-leaks/blob/mas...

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#236

Post by [deleted] »

fbonetti wrote: post #231
jimmy1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this a blackmail goldmine? I am ignorant of Grindr, but what I have heard it is basically Tinder but for gay men. Would Tinder be blackmail data? It's hook ups and relationships, dating, etc, no?

You really can't imagine any scenario in which this information could be used for blackmail?

[deleted]

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#237

Post by esilverberg2 »

salvar wrote: post #228
esilverberg2 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEO of SCRUFF here, and daily reader of HN. We have not, do not, and would not share this information with third parties. The data that we share with our third-party ad providers is: - Your location (so you can get those local car dealer ads) - Your gender - Your age - The targeting keyword "gay" We currently use AdMob and MoPub to provide our network advertising. More broadly, this kind of information is never somet…

How granular is the location data you share, on the scale from postcode to lat/lon?

For these third-party ad networks, they accept a lat/lng, so we (and I suspect most apps) just pass in a value obtained from the device.

That said, upon further reflection, a local advertiser could surely get enough targeting information with a much, much less precise value...we'll look into making this change in a future release.

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#238

Post by tekism »

smacktoward wrote: post #200
rdtsc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. Combine this with the Chinese OPM hack, where extremely personal data for most government employees with security clearance has been stolen, and they have a blackmail goldmine on their hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... They can verify what has been reported on sf-86 vs what might be found from this service. Any affairs or issues not reported are ripe for blackmail. Possibil…

Think of it as a business opportunity. Blackmail as a Service™!

BMaaS

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#239

Post by rdtsc »

jimmy1 wrote: post #230
rdtsc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. Combine this with the Chinese OPM hack, where extremely personal data for most government employees with security clearance has been stolen, and they have a blackmail goldmine on their hands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... They can verify what has been reported on sf-86 vs what might be found from this service. Any affairs or issues not reported are ripe for blackmail. Possibil…

Why is this a blackmail goldmine? I am ignorant of Grindr, but what I have heard it is basically Tinder but for gay men. Would Tinder be blackmail data? It's hook ups and relationships, dating, etc, no?

> but what I have heard it is basically Tinder but for gay men. Would Tinder be blackmail data? It's hook ups and relationships, dating, etc, no?

Absolutely when cross-referenced with information from OPM database. Employee with TS/SCI clearance working on a hasn't reported reported his gay affairs (that his wife might not know about even). The Chinese find out, approach him and make him an offer "Look buddy, how 'bout we become friends. You just tell us what you know and we'll give you some money and most importantly keep quiet about your meeting with your secret partner on such and such dates or places?"

Re: Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties

#240

Post by adamzk »

1) it's all in the terms of service. Idk why anybody is surprised. They own everything you enter into the app anywhere full stop.

2) it's not going anywhere. Its the gay Facebook. It has monopolized the market of an already vulnerable demographic so they can do whatever they want and still charge an extraordinary amount (almost $20 per month??) and provide no customer service.

The app doesn't even function as advertised (at least on Android). Push notifications and read receipts have been broken for years. Btw if you restrict the permissions of the app they permanently change your status to offline.

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