![]() Read More: TikTok Has Started Collecting Your ‘Faceprints’ and ‘Voiceprints.’ Here’s What It Could Do With Them These packages can feature users of specific apps, like dating apps, explains Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. Someone could feasibly approach one of these third party vendors, King says, and pay for a package of location data, which might include when a user logged in and out, their approximate locations, and their phone’s static ID number (a unique string of numbers assigned to each mobile device). The data is transferred under the expectation that user identities will be made anonymous. Many apps, especially free ones, sell aggregated data-which can include demographics or location information-about their users to third party vendors as an extra source of revenue these vendors then turn around and sell that data to advertisers looking for information on particular types of users, explains King. “There’s an industry whose full existence is to gather as much data about everyone, and then to sell it to anyone that will buy it,” Arrieta says. Regardless, Andrés Arrieta, director of consumer privacy engineering at the data privacy non-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells TIME the practice of sharing data with third party vendors is incredibly common among mobile apps. ![]() It is not yet clear how The Pillar obtained the data it analyzed. Grindr did not respond to follow-up questions asking for details on how it had investigated the issue internally, but in a statement received after the initial publication of this article, said that it “has not and does not sell anonymized user data to data brokers.” “Grindr has policies and systems in place to protect personal data, and our users should continue to feel confident and proud in using Grindr regardless of their religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.” We have looked closely at this story, and the pieces simply do not add up,” a Grindr spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. “We do not believe Grindr is the source of the data behind the blog’s unethical, homophobic witch hunt. It’s still unclear how exactly The Pillar obtained Burrill’s phone data and Grindr denies that it came from the app. “It shows just how low the threshold is if you want to actually target an individual.” How third party vendors get your data “It’s an excellent example of the lack of data protection in America,” says Jennifer King, a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Privacy experts tell TIME the controversial report highlights the sorry state of the current data privacy landscape. Read More: Your iPhone’s Next Software Update Aims to Foil App Trackers and Digital Advertisers. ” It says the data “conveys mobile app data signals during two 26-week periods, the first in 2018 and the second in 20,” and says the information was “obtained from a data vendor and authenticated by an independent data consulting firm contracted by The Pillar.” The article cites “commercially available app signal data” from “a mobile device correlated to Burrill” that was “obtained and analyzed by The Pillar. The company also warned people not to use their Grindr logins for other apps or websites.Regardless, many online commentators raised the same question: Wait, just how exactly did The Pillar get this information? Grindr said in a statement it was aware of the vulnerabilities that Faden had found and had changed its system to prevent access to data regarding blocked accounts. They’re putting people’s lives at risk by doing that.” Security researcher Cooper Quintin blasted: “There are a million reasons why you might not want someone to find your location through Grindr, and Grindr is dealing with that as a non-issue. He told NBC news how he had set up a website called C**kblocked which allowed users to see who blocked them after they entered their username and password.īut he was shocked to discover that it gave him access to users’ unread messages, email addresses, deleted photos, and allowed him to pinpoint their exact location. The issue was even thought to affect people who have opted out of sharing data, reports The Sun.Ĭybersecurity expert Trever Faden said: “One could, without too much difficulty or even a huge amount of technological skill, easily pinpoint a user’s exact location.” SECURITY experts found a software error in gay dating app Grindr that could have exposed the real identities of its three million daily users.
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