Gay sex is still illegal in 71 countries in the world. Many of them still have the death penalty
https://76crimes.com/76-countries-where-homosexuality-is-ill...
It's extremely sad how homosexuality is criminalised in such a large part of the world and it makes leaks of Grindr even more dangerous than just for the prospect of blackmail or just exposure.
First of all, we need to stop characterizing it as some kind _emotional_ thing like "love". It is not an emotional thing. It's a real thing.
But I changed my comment as it was not my intention to offend. On the contrary. Just saying "homosexuality" sounds distant and clinical so I said love to make it feel more real. Because really that's what it's about isn't it? For me love is what makes a relationship real. One based on just sex isn't, at least not to me.
Why would something emotional not be real? Sexual attraction is a big part of love but I think the term goes much further than that.
I've heard that some American religions try to 'fit' gay feelings into their principles by telling members it's ok to feel but not to act. Perhaps this is the reason for this sentiment? That by saying "love" I subscribe to the idea that only the physical act makes it 'real'? I find that concept very strange. As if the act is more real than the feeling of love or attraction for someone. For me it's the opposite.
In any case I changed it because I was clearly expressing a sentiment I didn't want to convey. Thanks for pointing it out.
It doesn’t make these laws less regressive, but it does (in most cases) somewhat limit the scope of the laws.
Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.
Because of the consolidated nature of the market, and the winner-takes-all nature of the industry, I really believe that it is impossible for a new entry to gain popularity and focus on hard problems like security.
This is fundamentally a problem with capital allocation and incentives. There's not much that a small team can do about it.
I'm sure that can't be what you are trying to say - although, if it is, I can certainly understand why you made a throwaway to say it.
It's a comment about dating apps, not about people who decided not to go into dating apps i.e. found "a market you can address without doing that."
We all want our data to be handled securely, and we should try to understand why that does not happen.
No one has to make a dating app. I don't see how "no one else could do it without betraying their users either!" as you argue - and, again, even granting this is true, which you've done nothing thus far to show - excuses the actual betrayal that actually has occurred. If you'd like to make an argument that it does, I'd be interested to hear that.
So, sure, the one comment to which you've directly responded here, I'll call that out of line on my part. Everything else I've said throughout these comments stands.
And there always will be someone trying the unscrupulous approach, no matter how many people decide not to.
The incentives are broken, and telling the people who point out that the incentives are broken that they're just making excuses for bad behavior doesn't actually fix the incentives.
It’s an observation that market conditions seem to disadvantage anyone who DOESN’T do that, so unless you like spending a bunch of effort and time (and being less competitive overall because of it, and likely go nowhere), maybe spend your effort somewhere else if you don’t like to be that way.
There are a ton of markets like this. If you wanted to open a ‘good’ check cashing place for instance, go right ahead. Just don’t be surprised if you lose your shirt trying it by not being like the other, less scrupulous players.
This thread reads to me as there may be perverse incentives due to nature of dating and capital markets that make it nearly impossible to compete while valuing security.
But this is a conscious choice. A small team should not need to make the decision to do something like this.
Also Grindr or Scruff isn't exactly small and have a fairly devoted base that doesn't end just because they get into a relationship.
Dating apps also suck at giving compelling reasons to pay them unless the app is purposefully made worse so they can sell the functionality back.
We have 10+ years of Google, Facebook, and others handing out major tools and functionality for free because of the privacy invasion.
I have to wonder how things would have looked had that not become the norm.
As far as being purposefully made worse, yeah both apps do that. Grindr charges $100, Scruff charges $120 a year. Considering how popular both apps are I have to assume they are pulling in quite a bit of money.
At least in the US, one might imagine this is more important to users than hiding their sexual preference.
I'm not sure I agree, though. In an open relationship it'd be no surprise to my partner if I were using Grindr (he probably would be too, in that case!) and I think therefore that'd be more or less orthogonal to the concern around the risk of forcible outing posed by Grindr's misuse of data. Both are certainly of concern, but I think independently so.
understood. the only practical response to the banal corporate indifference of modern markets is ultraviolence. establish a rival dating app and send ninjas to the bedrooms of match owners to threaten their lives
hn says "there's not much a small team can do about it" but they are clearly considering only a small team of technologists and a few salespeople/growth marketers. hn has drastically discounted the impact a small team of (kunai-wielding, not mid-2010s startup recruiter speak) ninjas can have
>Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.
Match owns almost all of the dating app market because they've acquired who? Startups who created popular apps in a crowded marketplace that they don't already own.
Now, if you want to argue that you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace without accepting a buyout offer from the dominant player, now that's a topic I think is worth quite a bit of discussion.
Well, they can. New entrants to the dating app market always start out this way. They gain loads of initial trust and word of mouth growth by putting users first. But they inevitably fall victim to the same market forces as their competition, and slowly become the same thing. It happened to Tinder, it happened to Bumble, and it will happen to Hinge.
Sounds like a business opportunity.
People still use Grindr a ton even though these security issues have been well known for years and in most areas users have real concerns for their safety and lives if they’re caught using it, so I can’t say they’re wrong.
It is actually what I would expect from a dating site. Match group apps look more like a vehicle that only exists to transfer money from your pocket into theirs.
And honestly, I think it's necessary.
I think I'm hardly making an original argument, but a big problem is binding Compute and Data, so companies have an incentive to hoard as much data as possible and keep it hostage. Feels like deep down that's the whole valuation of Silicon Valley
Honestly I should look to see if there's places that are working on privacy preserving metrics systems and apply.
But in the end, IMHO what really needs to happen is to enable full data ownership. The semantic web, there was also another project by Tim Berners Lee...
Of course there is an opposition that believes this hinders digital development in Europe, which is quite slow or nonexistent, but that is also often caused by said opposition itself instead of privacy laws. Because the few digital experts need all their energy in fighting their ideas and corruption.
The average case is quite bad, but I wouldnt generalize it to quite every app. Scruff, for example, does take privacy seriously - both in rhetoric and in their user-visible design decisions.
That's not to say there might not be vulnerabilities (which could be said about any company or service), but they don't treat it as a secondary priority.
Grindr, on the other hand, is actively malicious with how aggressively it sells and/or exposes user data willfully.
But I just take Scruff's words with a grain of salt at this point. There is so much that they can do server side that we can't block.
A big part of me thinks it is just inevitable until something like this comes out about Scruff. I don't want to think that... but we have been burned way too many times by apps. Look at what came out about several mental health apps a few days ago.
I really don't trust any of them (App or Website), enough so I have seriously contemplated getting an iPod touch or something and tethering anytime I want to use them. But I have not quite gone that far yet.
There are certain conveniences the apps get you.
Facebook and Google have become very good at tracking you across the web. Sniffles has ads (admittedly all of them are to sign up for premium but I don't know how those ads are served... I have not looked).
So add in google fonts or some other tracking mechanism and suddenly you have a ton of data to tie someone too a website that is meant to be anon. (more or less, I know its not quite that simple but I don't think being on the web makes it necessarily any better)
Sex is still considered taboo in many parts of the world and some parts of the US.
Now this, we have them using the Facebook API and them knowing every time I open the app (or did).
I have made every choice I can to reduce the privacy invasion that these companies engage in, but there are simply no alternatives for this one. I would be very surprised to find out that Scruff is actually any better.
The web based ones are likely far far worse.
I hate that this has become normal so much.