Grindr agrees to pay £26 million over user data sharing claims
About 12,000 UK users sued dating app Grindr, alleging it shared sensitive personal data, including HIV status, with advertisers. The company has agreed to pay £26 million while denying wrongdoing.
Dating app Grindr, aimed primarily at the LGBTQ+ community, has settled a lawsuit brought by around 12,000 users in Britain who claimed the company shared highly sensitive personal information with advertisers without proper consent. The 2024 lawsuit alleged that in some cases this included users' HIV status. Under the settlement reached this week, Grindr will pay claimants a total of £26 million (about €30 million/$35 million). The company stresses the payment is not an admission of liability, continues to dispute the allegations, and no court judgment has been issued.
How personal data becomes a profile
The case highlights a broader issue: what happens to the data people hand over to apps every day. Jan Penfrat, a digital policy expert at European Digital Rights (EDRi), says major tech firms often make it deliberately difficult for users and regulators to understand what data is collected and why. For example, installing WhatsApp grants it access to a user's entire contact list, meaning phone numbers of people who don't use the app — and never gave consent — end up on company servers.
Companies such as Google build detailed profiles from this kind of data and sell targeted-advertising products based on them. These profiles combine information users voluntarily share with inferences drawn from behavior, such as guessing someone's home address, income level, or community affiliation based on location data.
Strong rules, limited bite
The EU has some of the world's strictest data protection rules, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. This year the EU Commission fined Apple €500 million, Meta €200 million, and Google €890 million for violations. Yet those figures look modest next to Alphabet's 2025 net profit of roughly €117 billion. Penfrat argues that Brussels lacks the political will to act more forcefully against tech giants and that European regulators remain under-resourced, while Europe's continued reliance on US-based cloud, platform and AI infrastructure makes effective oversight harder to achieve.
