Grindr will pay £26m. The disputed data included whether users had HIV
A dating app has agreed to hand over £26m after claims it passed people's most private details — HIV status, sexual orientation, ethnicity — to outside firms. It says it did nothing wrong. It is paying anyway.
Somewhere on Grindr there is a field where you can say whether you have HIV, and when you were last tested. The app says the point of it is to cut stigma and help people make informed health choices. According to a claim brought in the High Court in 2024, that kind of information was also going out of the door to third parties.
On Friday, in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Grindr said it had settled. The price: two payments of £13m, one due by 31 December and one by 31 March 2027. The settlement was reached on 2 September. It includes no admission of liability, and Grindr says the claims relate to data practices from before 2020, when the app was owned by the Chinese firm Kunlun.
This is the rare case where a privacy story ends with money moving. Most don't. Usually a company is told off, promises to do better, and the people whose details travelled get a blog post about how much their trust matters. Here a law firm, Austen Hayes, signed up more than 11,000 claimants and walked away with a number attached.
Do the arithmetic and it is sobering. £26m split across more than 11,000 people is a bit over £2,300 each — although the filing only says the money goes to the counterparties and does not say how it will be divided. Roughly the price of a decent second-hand car, for a fact about your body that you can never take back.
There is also a price history here, and it is the most useful part of the story. In 2018 it emerged that Grindr had been sharing personal data, including HIV status, with two analytics services named in the claim as Apptimize and Localytics. At the time the company defended the practice as being in line with industry standards, then stopped sharing the HIV data. Norway's data protection watchdog fined it £5.5m. In 2022 the UK Information Commissioner's Office reprimanded it. Both of those cost less than what a group of ordinary users, organised by a law firm, has just extracted.
That is the mechanism worth watching. Regulators set a fine and move on. Claimants come back with a headcount. When 11,000 people can be gathered into one action, the cheapest option for a company stops being a strongly worded apology, and the maths of collecting sensitive data changes — even for data collected years ago under different owners.
Anyone who has ever ticked a sensitive box in an app because it seemed useful at the time: a health field, an ethnicity field, an orientation field. Especially people who joined dating apps at 19 or 22, when the app felt like a private room and the terms of service were something you scrolled past in four seconds. Also anyone who assumed that a company changing hands — Kunlun sold up, Grindr became a publicly-listed company in 2022 — wipes the slate: it doesn't, and this £26m is the proof. And the quieter group: people who never used Grindr but whose employer, insurer or favourite fitness app also asks health questions, and who have never once asked who else gets to read the answers.
Two dates you can actually check. £13m is due to be paid by 31 December, and another £13m by 31 March 2027. Grindr says its privacy practices have been overhauled since 2020, and that it remains, in its words, a safe space for users. What the filing does not say is how the money will be split between more than 11,000 claimants, or when any individual sees a penny. On that, nobody has given a date.
Grindr is paying £26m while disputing the allegations and admitting no liability. So the cheapest item in this whole deal was being in the right. Which raises the question the settlement doesn't answer: if a fact about your health is worth about £2,300 once it has already been shared, what was it worth to the people who received it?
Sources: BBC News (Technology), Liv McMahon — "Grindr to pay £26m to settle claims it allegedly shared users' HIV status"; Grindr filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, settlement reached 2 September.
Приложение заплатит £26 млн за то, что самые интимные данные — ВИЧ-статус, ориентация, национальность — уходили рекламным подрядчикам: это редкий случай, когда утечка личного превращается в реальные выплаты людям.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections