31–40 of 114 posts
Nice to see someone taking the Chinese foothold in SV seriously. I've also heard people who go to work for Chinese companies are then blacklisted from US Government defense- and intel-related work for 1 year. Can anyone confirm?
I wonder if the same owner as Tinder and OkCupid will buy this, becoming a dating (and casual sex, and etc.) superpower. I always thought funny how OkCupid pushes ads like "You're tired of the dirty flesh market of Tinder? We hear you! Come use OkCupid!" and they have the same owner as Tinder
$15 billion market cap, $1.7b in sales, $477m in profit. Only 1,400 employees. Match, despite being public, is of course roughly 80% owned by InterActiveCorp (IAC).
The proper solution would be not to collect personal data, especially if it is not necessary for functioning of the app, rather than worry about who is going to buy the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other dating apps also allow users to state their sexual preferences, so although Grindr might have a higher density of potential blackmail material, they're not even guaranteed to have the largest collection. There must be something else that sets them apart from others. (Maybe they were the first to be acquired by a Chinese company?)
My guess is the density of potential blackmail material _is_ what sets it apart from the others -- the very act of being registered on Grindr is almost a smoking gun for being non-heterosexual if you wanted to out somebody. Much better odds of finding a target that matches with your other info and much more "damning" evidence to scare people with. edit: Furthermore, what other Chinese company owns a dating site used…
Regarding your edit: I didn't mean that there was another Chinese company owning a dating site used by Westerners, but that it would explain what made Grindr special if there weren't another such company.
I thought Cfius could only block deals. I’ve never heard of them forcing a sale and the article doesn’t really speak to this odd situation.
People are starting to wake up to the fact that china won't stop until the west stops it.
Nice to see someone taking the Chinese foothold in SV seriously. I've also heard people who go to work for Chinese companies are then blacklisted from US Government defense- and intel-related work for 1 year. Can anyone confirm?
I definitely want confirmation on this. I could see the security-clearance folks being skeptical of someone who moved to mainland China to work, but not of someone who, say had a job in the US at a Chinese-owned company like AMC [1] or Riot Games [2].
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/the-biggest-american-companies...
Left unspoken is that the behavior of users of the app is ipso facto a security risk, regardless of who happens to own the platform they're using. This was why the US historically was leery about employing homosexuals in security contexts - they are vulnerable to blackmail and engage in behavior that makes them physically vulnerable (eg anonymous chemsex) on top of that.
And straight people can't be blackmailed or engage in chemsex? There's a pile of examples of such cases, just check Wikipedia.
In fact it's because of this very stigma that Grindr makes for particularly good blackmail material - whether you think the stigma is warranted or not.
As a practical example, I'm guessing there's concern that they could get personal sexuality information about someone in the military and extort them with it. Seems really quite plausible to me.
Not sure how this works as far as who should or shouldn't own these companies but there is some potential utility there, with very very little cost.
I thought Cfius could only block deals. I’ve never heard of them forcing a sale and the article doesn’t really speak to this odd situation.
My understanding was they make a recommendations and then the POTUS makes the final call, even if that might be to let CFIUS's decision stand by not making a call.
I heard from some folks in an acquisition by a foreign company going through an acquisition that they got a lot of pressure from CFIUS with requests for more and more data, and they were pretty sure the deal would be blocked. They expected the process to last months more anyway, and then... someone visited the VP and POTUS one day, took some photos, and it was automagiclly approved. The understanding was that if it was up to the POTUS anyway and he liked it, process over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What makes Grindr special in this regard ? I’m sure there are other dating or social apps out there that also could be foreign owned and used for espionage....??? select opm.name, opm.address from opm_security_clearance_files opm join grindr_users grinder where grinder.phone_number = opm.phone_number and opm.clearance in ('SECRET', 'TOP SECRET', 'SCI'); If any of those people are in the closet, they could be suscep…
Replace grindr by some_other_site where some_other_site.orientation != 'straight' or some_other_site.fetish in (...) and it works out to the same result, no?
Grindr is mostly used for semi-anonymous "hookups" - I am told anecdotally by people who used it and by the media at large - which is something even out and proud people might not wish the world to know (e.g. because their spouse might disprove), especially not in harsh detail. A lot of the communication on grindr ought to be pretty explicit too given how it gets used, something you might not want to see made public either, even if you're out of the closet already.
Now the other theoretical site might be as "bad" or even more so as grindr (the fetish website you suggested), or it might be a "tame" website used mostly in a "tame" manner, which of course still has "potential" to a blackmailer, but less so than the grindrs, tinders, backpages, adultfriendfrinders, etc of this world.