Gay Dating App "Grindr" to be fined almost € 10 Mio

Identification & Authentication "Grindr" to be fined almost € 10 Mio over GDPR complaint. The Gay Dating App was illegally sharing sensitive data of millions of users. In January 2020, the Norwegian Consumer Council and the European privacy NGO noyb.eu filed three strategic complaints against Grindr and several adtech companies over illegal sharing of users’ data. Like many other apps, Grindr shared personal data (like location data or the fact that someone uses Grindr) to potentially hundreds of third parties for advertisment. Today, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority upheld the complaints, confirming that Grindr did not recive valid consent from users in an advance notification. The Authority imposes a fine of 100 Mio NOK (€ 9.63 Mio or $ 11.69 Mio) on Grindr. An enormous fine, as Grindr only reported a profit of $ 31 Mio in 2019 - a third of which is now gone. Link to the decision by the Norwegian DPA (PDF) Background of the case. On 14 January 2020, the Norwegian Consumer