Three stories about assholes on Grindr
The meanest, most unethical thing I’ve ever done is out someone using Grindr.
Around the time dating apps first became a thing, I was at a small liberal arts college about half an hour outside of Philadelphia. I was single, and actively used Grindr (and Scruff, and OkCupid, and a passel of other apps and sites) to meet men.
One afternoon, a new profile showed up, listed a few hundred feet away. (At a college of 1200 people, this was a relative novelty.) The profile picture showed a white guy in a Swarthmore basketball uniform, head cropped out of the frame, with a single letter listed as his name.
And so, for no reason except boredom and prurience and a mild, irrational dislike for athletes left over from high school, I made it my mission to discover the mystery basketball player’s true identity.
It wasn’t even a challenge.
Within half an hour, I found him on Facebook, and even found the photo of him on a basketball court that he’d cropped for his Grindr profile. I took to the internet, triumphant. Fortunately, I had the decency not to post his name; but I posted enough that anyone sufficiently interested could follow my steps. Mission accomplished.
About a week later, I came to my senses. I deleted the post. And then I went on to write an entire dissertation about privacy, safety, and identity on Grindr, to try to deal with my guilt for an afternoon of college stupidity, targeted at someone I’d never even met, for doing something that wasn’t shameful or wrong or really remarkable at all.
That time I got in a fight on Twitter with Dan Savage
Another story:
In 2012, someone calling himself “Closet Case Confusion” wrote in to Savage Love to ask what to do about a friend, “Chad,” who he’d found on Grindr:
Last night, Marcelo was on Grindr and got a message from a guy who turned out to be Chad! Chad sent a face pic, Marcelo sent a faceless one back, they chatted. It turns out that Chad is experienced enough to know his homosex likes and dislikes and carry on a detailed conversation about them with a guy on Grindr. Should we say something to Chad? Would letting him know he’s been outed be the best course of action? Should we have a gayvention?
Dan responded (it turns out characteristically) that Chad “hadn’t ‘been outed’ … [he’d] outed himself.”
There was a code of conduct for friends of closet cases when I was in college … and a section that dealt with dance-floor make-out sessions: If you saw a guy who told you he was straight in class on Friday morning making out with some random dude on the dance floor of the campus gay bar on Friday night (or in the gay bar three towns over), you had a right — no, you had a responsibility — to tap him on the shoulder, smile, and say, “Welcome out, dude.”
Same goes for Grindr: If you find a “straight” friend swapping dick pics on an app, according to Dan it’s your duty as a gay man to shove him out of the closet.
I disagreed. Dan’s response, basically, was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and he encouraged me to share my opinion in the comments on his site. No thanks, dude.
The point is: Western gay culture has a long and complicated history with outing as a practice. And where the outed party is a notorious hypocrite — say, George Alan Rekers — you can probably make a reasonable argument that we’re outing For The Greater Good. But it’s not clear to me what the Greater Good is re: closeted Chad, or the basketball player I outed, or any of the Olympic athletes that some straight guy at The Daily Beast went after in Rio.
That time some guy in Berlin got beaten up
One last story:
In October 2014, a Dutch artist named Dries Verhoeven took up residence in a glass-walled gallery space in the center of a public square in Berlin. Verhoeven was connected to Grindr on five smartphones, and was projecting his interactions with other users onto the walls of the gallery space. Verhoeven described the scene, titled “Wanna Play?”, as “an installation-performance that exposes the opportunities and tragedies of a phenomenon in gay culture: the sex date app.”
According to Verhoeven, the installation was supposed to interrogate how apps like Grindr and Tinder “influence the way we present ourselves and connect to each other, both in a positive as [sic] negative sense.”
Verhoeven didn’t disclose to users — either in his profile or in private chats — that their interactions were part of a public art installation.
Three days into his stay in the gallery space, he struck up a conversation with a local photographer named Parker Tilghman. Verhoeven invited Tilghman to come meet him. When he arrived at the address Verhoeven had given him, Tilghman found his conversations with the artist enlarged on the gallery’s walls. And, in his words (posted on Facebook), “I lost it.”
Tilghman attacked Verhoeven, punching him and destroying furniture in the installation space. In the same statement, Tilghman described Verhoeven’s project as “digital rape” and an unethical use of Grindr. Verhoeven’s actions, he said, violated the “safe space” offered by gay-targeted social networking services like Grindr.
Later that day, Verhoeven responded on his own Facebook page, framing Tilghman’s response as rooted in an unrealistic expectation of anonymity online. Verhoeven argued that his project didn’t cross any ethical lines in publicly displaying Tilghman’s profile and conversations with the artist because, in Verhoeven’s words, anonymity on Grindr is “a myth.”
Everyone who loads Grindr or a comparative app. on their smartphone can see the photos and profiles. In the agreement with Grindr users have to accept that their information will also be viewable without having to be registered (from the agreement: “You acknowledge that some of the Grindr Services may be accessed…without the need to register an account.”).
Verhoeven described the project as a use of publicly-available information on Grindr. Nothing in his installation, he suggested, did anything that any interested party with a smartphone couldn’t accomplish himself. He invited men who didn’t want to participate in the project to block him on Grindr.
Grindr’s staff disagreed with Verhoeven’s assessment of the ethics of the installation, characterizing his interactions with other users as “entrapment” and urging users to “flag” Verhoeven’s profiles to bring them to the service’s administrators’ attention. Grindr promised to ban Verhoeven. Two days later, only five days into the planned fifteen, Verhoeven shut down “Wanna Play?”, acknowledging pressure from Berlin’s gay community.
A few lessons
If there’s a single unifying thread in the three stories here, it’s that people are assholes — and that the internet has a way of magnifying their asshole-ness, giving them new tools with which to be even bigger assholes. But to dismiss these episodes as merely bad or unethical behavior is tantamount to the “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” argument. Like, sure, okay; but we should still do something about guns.
The first problem we’re dealing with here is a normative one: People (me seven years ago, a Daily Beast reporter, some avant-garde artist, anyone who takes a screenshot of the guy they’re chatting with) think it’s okay to recirculate personal information from Grindr. The backlash against today’s Daily Beast article suggests that we’re coming around to a consensus that that’s not okay.
Journalists and academic researchers are especially culpable here. If you’re not on Grindr to find a hookup, you should say so, upfront, in your profile. Nico Hines didn’t. That’s not okay. Lots of academics studying Grindr — including entire research groups who share a single profile—don’t. That’s not okay either.
The second problem is user education: People need to make sensible choices about what they share, with whom, and under what circumstances. That’s a deeply individual choice, and I don’t think we should try to be too prescriptive about it; but apps like Grindr can and should do more to make those choices a prominent part of the user experience.
For example, Grindr’s distance-masking feature gives users the ability to hide their precise location in the app — preventing a motivated, malicious user from using simple triangulation to figure out exactly where you are. The problems created by fine-grained location sharing are especially prominent for users in countries where being openly gay is a physical safety risk.
Having the setting at all is a positive step, but Grindr’s developers shouldn’t pat themselves on the back quite yet. While researching my dissertation, I spent years talking to Grindr users about how they manage their privacy. Most don’t know about this setting, or don’t really understand what it does. Something as simple as an in-app notification, prompting users in potentially risky countries to check their settings, could help.
The last problem is product design: Grindr needs to give users better tools to understand and control the circulation of their personal information.
One of the case studies I write about in my dissertation is the blog Douchebags of Grindr, which posts screenshots of the racist, ignorant, and wildly inappropriate things people write on their Grindr profiles. The guys in those screenshots are pretty unambiguously douchebags; still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they deserve to be publicly and indelibly shamed for their actions. As a normative matter, gay men should be nicer to each other. But as a privacy matter, I can’t get behind the tar-and-feather approach of Douchebags of Grindr.
The good news is, I see this as a problem that’s solvable through product design. For example, what if Grindr sent you a notification, a la Snapchat, whenever someone takes a screenshot of your profile? Snapchat’s screenshot detection feature fundamentally altered the privacy dynamics of the service, making it a visible violation of community norms to take someone else’s Snap offline. That feature is an incredibly powerful way to protect the safe space of an online community—and it could go a long way to preserve the “what happens on Grindr stays on Grindr” mentality that many users have.
I don’t want to pretend that I have all the answers. I hope that Grindr’s product managers and designers are thinking deeply about these issues, too, and that they’ll come up with even better answers than I have. I see it as their responsibility to do so.
