What Type of Work From Home(osexual) Are You?

https://quiz.tryinteract.com/#/5ec6b1dca0f8ff0014ffe94f?method=iframe

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With COVID spiking around the country and health experts calling on Americans to limit their Thanksgiving travel, plenty of people will be missing their usual gatherings with family and friends this year. To combat any holiday loneliness that might crop up, we’re giving our U.S. users a different Grindr premium feature each day over the long weekend. You may not be able to host or travel, but you’ll have more options to browse, chat, get into some virtual play, or just well-wish your Grindr neighbors from afar.

As we’ve been noting in our safety messaging since the spring, the best way to slow the spread of COVID and protect your community is to stay home and avoid meeting up in person. In some places, this is a requirement, but it’s a good idea for everyone. Being isolated, however, doesn’t mean being alone—here are some safe ways to connect during the outbreak:

• Meet up virtually with photos, audio, video chat, and group chat
• Flirt and get to know people on the app: discuss books, movies, careers, and kinks
• Reach out to another Grindr user for support if you’re feeling lonely or scared, or support someone who is
• ”Right Now” can wait—make plans to meet up in the future instead

It might not be the Thanksgiving we had all hoped for, but supporting each other and staying connected virtually during these times is a great way to preserve the spirit of the holiday without putting yourself and others at risk.

Check out the schedule of Happy Hour features below, and have a happy—and safe—Thanksgiving from Grindr.

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One of the best parts about being queer is getting together with your chosen family to weigh in on the latest in pop culture, sex, dating, politics, and whatever else is happening in the world at the moment. That’s why we created The RearView, a new podcast that brings together a diverse panel of LGBTQ+ personalities and beloved celeb guests to dish on weekly hot topics and burning queer questions. It’s kind of like The View…but gayer.

The idea to create a podcast came from a conversation about how Grindr acts as a hub for so many diverse members of a shared community, and how we wanted to create a space to amplify the conversations people were having on—and about—our app. When we reached out to Foreverdog—the home of popular podcasts like Race Chaser, Confronting Demons with Meg Stalter, and Midnight Snack—they immediately got our vision. A few months later, during Pride, The RearView was born.

At the heart of The Rearview is the heart of America, really, and an icon of the community herself, Monique Heart. She, along with pop star Chester Lockhart, comedian Jay Jurden, and Grindr expert Patrick Rogers, round out the panel of queer luminaries as they talk with Grindr users, spar over pop culture, and weigh in on the week’s tops and bottoms with the help of some very special guests. To date they’ve kiki’d with Alaska Thunderfuck, Gabriele Bertaccini, Monique Samuels, Michelle Collins, Julie Klausner, Matt Rogers, Miz Cracker and more.

The mission of The RearView—to foster a shared culture for Grindr users and create a space to listen to the community—has proved fruitful over the past six months. The show’s “Grindr Hotline” segment, where real Grindr users call in to ask questions about sex and dating, garnered enough responses to become a weekly installment. And the “Queer Legacy Question,” which is asked at the end of every episode and intended to cause a bit of a stir (Who’s the best Spice Girl? What’s the best poppers brand?), has been a lightning rod on social media and seen its share of celebs tweeting their opinions at us (@jansportnyc loved Chromatica, y’all).

Having a space outside the app to give voice to the Grindr experience and discuss queer life has been a rewarding endeavor, and we’re excited to see how the show grows further in its second six months. If you haven’t had the opportunity to check it out yet, The RearView is available on Spotify, iTunes, and everywhere else podcasts are available.

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Our fabulous hosts are counting down their personal Top-10 Queer Moments of 2020 - including Niecy Nash's gay wedding, the release of the Chromatica jockstrap, Trump getting Covid, and more!

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Back in early March, as we were planning Grindr’s involvement in what was to be the 50th anniversary of LA Pride—taking place just a few blocks from our West Hollywood headquarters—the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Within days, countries around the world had imposed various states of lockdown to curb the spread, and within weeks it was clear that all plans were off—2020 was going to look a lot different than any of us could have ever anticipated.

Our attention quickly shifted away from the typical hallmarks of Pride—parades, parties, and protests—to figuring out how we could help people celebrate safely from home while also supporting queer artists, activists and entertainers whose livelihoods were being impacted by the pandemic. We created Pride Perseveres, a month-long virtual festival that would bring all the best of Pride into the Grindr app, but we faced a challenge: the unexpected onset of the pandemic made developing a new calendar UI in time for Pride month unfeasible. So we decided to power it with something we already had implemented: Braze Content Cards. Without getting too deep into the tech nitty gritty, Braze’s tools allowed us to power a dynamic UI that could accommodate live performances, panels, feature giveaways and more in the app without having to build and test a custom backend solution (for more, see Braze’s excellent Pride Perseveres case study)

Pride Perseveres launched in June and ultimately featured more than 25 daily events that were free and accessible to all Grindr users globally. Pride in 2020 came not only amid a global pandemic, but also as the United States was seeing nationwide protests against racism and police brutality, and much of our Pride Perseveres programming facilitated further dialogue around those issues—including a Black & Queer State of the Union led by activist Dana Vivian White, a conversation on The New Queer Consciousness featuring a panel of queer Black activists, and a Black Gay Pride event organized in collaboration with Global Black Gay Men Connect.

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Pride Perseveres was also an opportunity to bring awareness to an another vital part of our community: Black trans folks, who continue to face epidemic levels of violence in the U.S. and abroad. Transgender Law Center’s Ash Stevens raised funds for TLC with a conversation on policies affecting Black trans folks, and Black Excellence Collective founder Joshua Allen moderated a session on Grassroots Black Trans & Non-Binary Activism that raised funds for For the Gworls. Throughout the month, 100% of proceeds from Grindr’s limited edition Pride tee, released in June as part of the Grindr Merch Shop, benefitted The Okra Project, which provides resources and meals to Black trans people around the world.

Additional Pride Perseveres programming ran the gamut, from cooking shows, DJ sets, and live speed dating with famous drag queens (Monet X Change is single, y’all) to performances by a range of multi-talented queer artists and musicians, many of whom you can catch a glimpse of below in our Pride Perseveres recap video.

By the time we wrapped in July, we had shared our platform with dozens of artists and activists whose work is the very embodiment of Pride, and millions of our users had engaged with Pride Perseveres from home as a safe alternative to in-person Pride events. Post-event surveying showed that 65% of our users liked the festival, with more than half wanting to see similar events and content in the future. To be able to support so much talent within the community while also providing our users with a safe and rewarding way to celebrate showed us that Pride truly does persevere, no matter what.

At Grindr, the security and safety of our users and products is a top priority. As reported in many places, there are multiple large scale vulnerabilities across the internet that surfaced from a software library called Log4j. In December, when this issue was disclosed by the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, we quickly activated our incident response teams and processes to assess the impact of this vulnerability on our products and customers.

Our initial assessment has found minimal usage of the affected log4j library. The small usage that was found has been reviewed by our team and successfully patched. At this time we have found no evidence of exploitation of this vulnerability observed within Grindr's environment.

Our threat mitigation team will continue to stay vigilant in monitoring this vulnerability, and as always will continue to keep the safety and security of our users at the forefront of our efforts.

-Joel Keating, Chief Information Security Officer | LinkedIn

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Now you might be thinking, “Grindr already had tags,” and you’re right—we did. But while those tags were an easy way to self-identify and express yourself on your profile, they weren’t searchable, and so they weren’t a great way to find other people into the same things as you.

My Tags, on the other hand, exist to help you express yourself and to help you find others who share your interests. So if you’re into cuddling—or carplay, or cruising—you can now quickly and easily search for and find others who are into those things too.

Here’s how it works:

To add tags just navigate to your profile, click “Edit Profile,” and select up to 8 tags from the My Tags section. Once you’ve added tags, you can click on a tag on your profile or another user’s profile to bring up a search of users near you who’ve also added that tag.

You can also search for tags by clicking on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the main grid. This will open a new page where you can search for tags either by typing them in or by tapping on a word that appears in your search suggestions. Either way, you can pull up a selection of nearby profiles that have added the tag you’re searching for.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Even though we’ll show you the closest people to your location when you search a tag, it’s possible that they could still be pretty far away depending on how densely populated your area is and how popular the tag is.
• We plan to add more tags in the near future, and are excited to hear what additional tags would resonate with our community. If you’re not seeing a tag you’d like added, just tap “Suggest a Tag” and let us know what you’d like to see.
• Lastly, the more people add tags to their profiles, the more useful searching for tags becomes—so go add some My Tags to your profile!

My Tags was born out of a desire to help our users find one another via shared interests—kinks, hobbies, personality and more—because it’s so much easier to start a conversation when you already know you’re into the same things as a potential connection. Stay tuned as we add new tags to the library and continue to roll out My Tags to additional countries and languages in the coming weeks.

-Bronwyn Lundberg, Associate Product Manager | LinkedIn

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First up: Access and Portability. All Grindr users now have automated access to the information stored by Grindr about them (with some limitations) both on our servers and on their device. AND the information is portable—meaning we will email you a copy of your information if you so desire. We’ve provided this option through our Customer Service team for years, but now it’s automated and self-serve.  The data you’ll receive spans the things you’d most likely expect, like your public profile information and chat history, along with some other interesting data, like your sign-in history and what ads we’ve shown you to promote other Grindr features.  

Make sure to read the Data Dictionary that comes with your data to see what the information means and how it is structured in the file.  And since this file could contain a lot of sensitive information, we’ve built some serious security into the process to verify ownership of your Grindr account and your ownership of the destination email address. You’ll find Download My Data (and most other privacy features) by accessing the sidebar menu (swipe from the left), clicking “Settings,” and scrolling to the “Security and Privacy” section.

Next up: Ad Targeting Opt-Out, which allows people to opt out of having their use of Grindr remembered by our Ad Partners—meaning they won’t receive LGBTQ+ ads outside their use of the Grindr app based on the fact that they have used the Grindr app. Grindr and our partners already honor the device-wide opt-out features in iOS and Android, but this new setting is for those users who want to receive targeted ads for most of their activities but not targeted ads based on their use of the Grindr app.  As with Download My Data, you’ll find this setting by accessing the sidebar menu (swipe from the left), clicking “Settings,” and scrolling to the “Security and Privacy” section (please note that if you use other LGBTQ+ apps or sites and have not triggered an opt-out there, you may still receive LGBTQ-focused ads outside of those apps and sites).

And last up for this round of privacy announcements: Viewed Me Opt-Out.  This privacy control allows users to remove themselves from the Viewed Me feature altogether. Users who activate the opt-out won't be added to the Viewed Me list of other users, but also won't be able to access their own Viewed Me list. You’ll see this feature show up in the Privacy section of the sidebar menu in the next few weeks.

A sincere thanks to our Product and Engineering teams for making these features a reality. I’m equally thankful to our Leadership team for keeping our privacy goals a top priority and to everyone else at Grindr that helped deliver these features for our users.

We’re not done! Much more to come on the privacy front so stay tuned.

-Shane Wiley, Chief Privacy Officer | LinkedIn

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At Grindr, you not only get to work on creating a best-in-class experience for the LGBTQ+ community, but you also work for a company where creativity and innovation flourish. Ideas that you develop have a real impact for users of the largest LGBTQ+ dating app in the market. Recently, Grindr hosted our annual Hackathon (AKA HackDay, Datathon, or Codefest) which brought together teams throughout the organization in the spirit of collaboration and innovation as they set out to solve challenges, introduce new ideas, and reimagine what Grindr is capable of in support of the LGBTQ+ community.

We sat down with some folks involved in the Hackathon and here is what they had to say about the impact of the event:

Alice Hunsberger, Senior Director & Global Head of Customer Experience, judged our “For Love” category, which centered on ideas around user safety, health, accessibility, or connection. We asked Alice to explain hackathons and what was the goal for them. Here is how she thinks about it:

“If you haven’t worked for a tech company before then you may be confused! During a hackathon, teams have to come up with a technical idea for their company and then build it as best they can, over a day or a long weekend. It’s called a “hackathon” because developers will just hack together code super-fast to build the thing, but not everything has to be code-based. The goal is to generate innovative ideas for the company, encourage cross-functional teamwork, and just have fun.”

At Grindr, the safety and security of the community we serve is always top-of-mind in the work we do, and this Hackathon reflects that same ethos. Teams competed in two categories: The first centered around business growth and impact while the second category focused on ideas that improved user safety, health, accessibility, or connection. All of the presentations showcased exceptional ideas around ways that Grindr can continue to support the global LQBTQ+ community.

Jack Harrison-Quintana, Director of Grindr for Equality, also served as one of the judges for the Hackathon and provided deeper insight into what makes Hackathons so impactful for companies:

“One of the things that I love about Hackathons is that it creates a space where people’s creativity is not restricted by existing priorities. It allows teams to incubate and build on ideas that could potentially go on to become future features of the actual app. I have been able to judge Hackathon presentations where we have gone on to implement all or parts of a project that were presented or even sparked ideas that we were not even considering yet.”

It is truly rewarding to work for a place that allows people to innovate in their fields while uplifting the queer community. This year’s Hackathon showcased the collaborative spirit of Grindr’s employees and their diverse talents. If you are looking for a culture that allows you to work at the intersection of technology and supporting the LGBTQ+ community, consider applying for a role with Grindr here. Hope to see you at the next Hackathon!

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‍Meet Liang Guan (she/her), our Revenue Operations Manager!

Liang has been with Grindr for over three years and has worked in revenue operations and data analytics since 2015. Her team at Grindr is in charge of programmatic advertising operations and revenue data analytics, helping to provide insights to leadership about how ad programming is impacting the business. This has the dual benefit of not only generating more revenue for the company but also continuously improving the user experience.

Check out Liang’s Grindr story below, and take a look at our careers page to learn more about our open revenue operations job opportunities.

What sparked your interest in data?

Coming from a finance background, I always knew I was enthusiastic about numbers and their stories. During my tenure in investment banking, I learned how to extract business insights from reading data and conveying those insights to stakeholders. I enjoyed impacting business decisions through my analytical work and data storytelling.

I was further introduced to data science techniques that impact finance while pursuing my MBA (yes, that means lots of excel!). Revenue operations at Grindr is my dream job; it encompasses those data techniques with immediate business impacts and important monetization decisions that directly impact our users.  

What drew you to tech or dating space specifically?

Even before working in the dating space, I was interested in understanding user behavior, the psychology that drives user choices in dating, and the idea of helping people find better matches. Being in the "business of love," I couldn't imagine any other field that leverages technology more interestingly. Every day I help people connect and reach each other in new and impactful ways.

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Tell us why you joined Grindr. What do you love most about our mission and our culture?

Joining Grindr was an easy decision for me. When I heard about the opportunity to serve the LGBTQIA+ community, I jumped on board! After working at Grindr for over three years, I am still confident that joining the company was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Supporting the community and working with passionate and driven coworkers inspires me to do my best work every day.

What interesting problems is your Grindr team solving for and what are you looking forward to for the future?

As our user base grows, we are focused on gaining deeper insights into how users connect and interact to better facilitate meaningful connections for the community. Grindr’s mission is to connect people in the LGBTQIA+ community, and revenue operations focus on empowering Grindr’s product development and business teams to support our mission.

For example, last year Grindr expanded the quantity of “nearby” user views from 100 profiles to 600, so free users could view more profiles and broaden their reach across the community. Our team was involved in that significant product change from the very beginning. We leveraged predictive analytics and developed advanced A/B testing to transform the experience and improve operational efficiency. Volunteered data enabled us to understand what the users needed and to transform it into product decisions. As a result, the “More Profiles” launch achieved a 30% improvement in conversion from a user experience optimization perspective.

What are your goals for growing your team?

The revenue operations team focuses on gaining self-volunteered knowledge from users about their behavior, processing large amounts of information efficiently, and helping to drive business decisions to improve the app. We aim to build a team that can quickly respond to Grindr's fast-growing product needs and broadens our understanding of our users and their needs. If you are passionate about helping the community, love turning data into actionable business insights, and want to help our leaders make informed decisions, please apply to join our team!

This weekend, in the aftermath of President Trump getting blocked on both Facebook and Twitter, the #grindr hashtag was trending due to several well-timed parody posts about both Trump and Lindsey Graham getting banned from Grindr.

While they were hilarious, we think this is a good time to set the record straight (no pun intended) about Grindr’s policies when it comes to politics and banning.

First, we’re not aware of either Trump or Graham having a Grindr profile. If they do, it’s surely on the down-low.

Second, our Community Guidelines state that we want you to be yourself and express yourself freely on Grindr, but not at the expense of someone else. We welcome free speech, and recognize that political preferences can be critical to finding a compatible match. For this reason, we don’t ban on political affiliation alone. Our users are free to say that they are conservative Republicans or Trump supporters if they like, just as they are free to say that they are liberal Democrats.

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However, white supremacists and violent insurrectionists are not welcome on Grindr. That goes beyond politics as usual. Grindr has no tolerance for hate speech or violence of any kind, and will permanently ban any user that is found to be engaging in or encouraging that kind of behavior, politician or not. So if Trump or Graham do want to create Grindr accounts, they better be on their best behavior.

-Alice Hunsberger, Sr. Director, Customer Experience | LinkedIn

As of last week, Grindr has a new set of Community Guidelines. For the most part, our rules are the same as they always have been, though we include more detail and transparency. However, there is one pretty big difference: we now allow you to post a photo of yourself in your underwear on your Grindr profile.

Why did we do this? As the new Senior Director of Customer Experience at Grindr, it’s my job to make sure that our user’s experience is a great one. In digging into our data, I saw that 25% of photos uploaded on Grindr were being rejected and over half of those were being rejected for being too sexual.

While our photo policies are largely governed by the app store rules from Apple (see App Store Review Guidelines 1.1.14) and Google (see Google Play Store Developer Program Policy on “Sexual Content and Profanity”) around indecency, Grindr is known for being a sex-positive app. Our marketing materials can be sexy, our users like to talk about sex and use Grindr to hook up, and we can all agree there should be no shame in that. It’s clear that many of our users expect to be able to upload sexy photos and have them approved, and so there were real feelings of frustration and confusion when that didn’t happen.

Here’s a public app review of ours:

Sad FB and Instagram aren't as strict with their policies as you are. I can't even upload a pic with just above the waist because I may be naked! It's BS and even underwear?!?! Come on, FB and Instagram allow that.

Even worse, I was also seeing feedback that enforcement of the photo rules felt arbitrary. People were noticing that their photo was rejected, but would see someone else’s similar photo approved. At best, this was frustrating, and at worst, it was being attributed to racism, body shaming, transphobia, or other types of bias from Grindr and Grindr moderators.

Here’s another public app review:

The most prejudiced dating app I've been on. Every time I make a profile with a shirtless pic my pix are constantly deleted because they are inappropriate, but there are countless guys of other ethnicities in their underwear and shirtless in their profiles. Just doesn't add up to me.

I want to be perfectly clear on this point: at Grindr, we are committed to diversity and inclusion in every way, and this extends to our moderation policies and training. We actively work to make our policy easy to understand and enforce objectively. Reviews like this that assume bias and ill-intent were a call to action—something had to change.

So what was actually causing this issue? The answer is simple, but mundane. In content moderation, there are a lot of grey areas and judgement calls. Not every photo will neatly fit into a rule, and so you create more rules and guidance for moderators so that they know what to do. Unfortunately, it’s easy to back yourself into a corner with this, and before you know it, you have incredibly detailed micro-rules for your internal team that are not at all intuitive or apparent to your users. You don’t see the forest for the trees.

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As a concrete example, we allowed photos of swimwear while outside, but not photos of underwear inside. On one hand, this seems logical. Swimwear is appropriate in a public context, while underwear is more private. However, it doesn’t easily hold up. What if someone has two photos, one of them wearing swim trunks inside, and one outside. The photos show exactly the same amount of skin, and neither are sexually provocative. Do we allow both? Neither? Just one? What if there are two photos, and the one with swimwear outside is actually more revealing than the one of underwear inside?

By trying to create clarity, the end result was actually a set of rules that wasn’t intuitive anymore, so our users were assuming we were biased in our decision making. Once we identified that there was an issue here, we set about figuring out how to make a change that would seem intuitive and make sense to our users. We did some user research and talked to real users of our app. We looked at data about photo uploads and rejections. We talked to employees about what expectations we had internally. And then we rewrote the rules.

Now we allow almost all photos of people in their underwear (and yes, in towels). As we outline in our Community Guidelines, there are some basic decency expectations which apply to all photos, not just ones with underwear, like: no erections, no nudity, no sex acts, no pornographic poses, no extreme closeups of erogenous zones. This applies to all types of clothing, all gender presentations, and all situations indoor and outdoor. The spirit of the rule is clear, and the guidelines are more simple.

The outcome of this change is that we cut photo rejections in half, without any increase in flags for nudity or pornography from our users. That’s a big success, and I hope that by continuing to increase education about our rules and guidelines, we continue to close that gap further. There will always be some nuances and grey areas in our guidelines that require us to make a judgement call, but hopefully now we are more aligned with you—our users and our community.

That said, there is still work to be done. In addition to human moderation, we do use some automated machine learning systems, and mistakes are possible with both systems. You may see a photo on Grindr that got approved and shouldn’t have been. If this is the case, please flag it for us so we can take it down. We are also constantly improving our training materials for the moderation team, and are working hard to include more examples of different ethnicities, body types, and gender presentations. We are also working on creating specific anti-bias training for the moderation team.

Finally, there’s more that we can do about better communicating our guidelines, philosophies, and moderation practices with our community. We hope to continue to be more transparent and to earn your trust and confidence in our systems. Please keep an eye out for more updates from us in the future, and in the meantime, enjoy those underwear photos!

-Alice Hunsberger, Sr. Director of Customer Experience | LinkedIn

Are Grindr users subjected to Automated Decision Making (ADM)? What does that even mean? Automated decision-making is the process of making a decision by automated means without human involvement. For example, an app or service might make a recommendation to a user, or personalize a feature based on an algorithm (data + math) instead of a human decision. Sometimes, these can be quite simple, like "people who like this often also like that.” Other times, they are more complex. The privacy world is recently in a flurry with news about ADM systems, which are sometimes lumped together with more advanced systems that embrace AI (Artificial Intelligence), and questions around how apps like ours use them.  

Many proposed state privacy laws in the US are now engaging on this topic, and a few weeks ago the EU Commission released a 120+ page document covering their proposed rules for Artificial Intelligence which they believe provide “[p]roportionate and flexible rules [that] will address the specific risks posed by AI systems and set the highest standard worldwide.” The rules focus primarily on high-risk AI systems that could have a significant impact on a person’s real-world movements and opportunities (employment, law enforcement, border control, etc.).  

There are some powerful AI systems that are on the horizon. Self-driving cars that have to make very fast decisions based on what they can see or sense are an example. IBM's Watson famously beat champions in Jeopardy and Chess. And AI systems are getting more powerful, quickly. But for some time, most every service you use will not be using the AI of science fiction but more AI “lite.”

For EU users, Article 22 of the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) states, “The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.” I really like the UK ICO’s approach to this part of the GDPR by providing a detailed check-list to walk through the responsibilities as a company with respect to ADM.

Does this matter to Grindr and our users? Today, it largely doesn’t impact our users as we don’t engage in ADM outside of our security systems—definitely not to the point of affecting a user’s legal status or their legal rights, i.e., “producing a legal effect.” In the Grindr Privacy Policy we call out the following use of collected personal information:  “For Automated Decision Making - for example, to detect and remove spammers, detect and remove non-compliant images, etc. through artificial intelligence.”  

As described, we have automated security systems that try to identify those attempting to create spam accounts and block them, and our systems identify and remediate accounts that are breaking our community guidelines. As with any automated system, we do get some false negatives which lets some of the bad stuff through. We are grateful for our ever-vigilant users to help report those accounts. Sadly, there is also the chance for false positives, meaning someone who didn’t do something wrong is flagged as someone who did. Finding the balance between the two is difficult and complex. We continually fine-tune our systems to navigate this ever-evolving challenge. Rest assured, we give those users who fall into the “false positive” bucket a direct line to our Customer Experience team who can remedy the situation quickly if our systems made an error.

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I recently shared with Tom Quisel, our Chief Technology Officer, that many people think Grindr’s systems are more sophisticated than they really are. I appreciate that his teams deal with a ton of complexity, but how much of what we do at Grindr today reaches the bar of Automated Decision Making or Artificial Intelligence?

Tom shared this with us:

“The lines between Automated Decision Making (ADM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are blurry. Part of the confusion arises because AI is used as a catch-all term to refer to different concepts. AI can refer to the simulation of human intelligence, to computers that are capable of problem solving, to specific skills such as speech recognition or computer vision, or to computerized agents that perceive their environment in some way and attempt to achieve a goal, just to name a few. AI is sometimes conflated with Machine Learning (ML), the science of inferring rules from data without direct human involvement. AI can be as simple as a common thermostat: a device that perceives its environment by measuring the temperature and decides to turn the heat on or off to achieve its goal of holding a particular temperature. Many factors need to be considered when assessing the ethical implications of an ADM system. Among others, there's the complexity of a system, how it is used, how it can be overridden, the data used to create the system, any biases, alternative options, and the intentions behind it.

To focus on Grindr, our app provides a straightforward set of features that allows users to search for and chat with other nearby users who've used the app recently. The app puts the power to search, view, filter, and block in the hands of our users. When a user searches for others nearby, Grindr displays those who were online recently and applies the searching user's filters (such as age, tribe, relationship status, etc...), sorted by distance. Sometimes a little randomness is thrown in to keep results fresh. That's it. There's no recommendation algorithm to speak of on Grindr today. Grindr gets out of the way, and lets our users drive their own experience.”

While Grindr doesn’t leverage AI or ADM outside of security systems today, we do endeavor to make “smarter” product features in the near future (better cascade results, recommended tags for searches, etc.). As we explore ADM and AI for Grindr features,  our ongoing privacy commitment to our users includes transparency, and where appropriate, we’ll provide controls to our users to turn off or provide input to help finetune the automated systems.

-Shane Wiley, Chief Privacy Officer | LinkedIn