Gazetteer SF: Grindr’s AI ‘wingman’ has privacy experts concerned

Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at privacy nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, told Gazetteer she worries that any Grindr data sent to third party companies may be incorporated into data sets used to build other chatbots and AI tools, increasing the risk of data breaches. (EPIC, last year, filed a complaint to the FTC against Grindr for its privacy violations.) 

Even if the data is anonymized or aggregated, Schroeder points out that it’s easy to combine different types of data — especially in the sensitive categories that Grindr collects — to identify users.  

“There’s a lot that can get pulled from that, and I think people don’t always anticipate that,” she said. “It shouldn’t have to be your full-time job to keep companies from being creeps.”

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