Grind limits visibility of Olympic athletes to guard their privateness

LGBTQ courting app Grindr has restricted the worldwide visibility of customers logging in from the Beijing Olympics Village to be able to shield athletes from potential outing and harassment.

The app’s “Explore” operate, which lets customers browse profiles from any location worldwide, has been adjusted to exclude profiles logging in from the Olympic Village, reports Bloomberg News. Users within the Olympic Village will nonetheless have the ability to browse close by profiles, however the brand new privateness setting ought to save athletes from worldwide snooping and publicity.

In previous Olympics, social media customers have used the app’s Explore operate to retrieve Grindr profiles from the occasion and share them online — a harmful exercise contemplating some athletes are from international locations the place homosexuality is both not publicly accepted or unlawful.

In 2016, a reporter for The Daily Beast, Nico Hines, was accused of outing numerous athletes after utilizing the app on the Rio Olympics to report on the video games’ courting and hookup tradition. Hines attended the video games in individual, although, which implies this latest privateness replace wouldn’t have stopped him from searching profiles. The article was later removed.

Commenting on the replace, director of Grindr for Equality, a division inside the firm, Jack Harrison-Quintana, stated: “We want Grindr to be a space where all queer athletes, regardless of where they’re from, feel confident connecting with one another while they’re in the Olympic Village.”

Users logging in to Grindr from the Olympic Village will probably be instructed: “Your privacy is important to us. Our Explore feature has been disabled in the Olympic Village so that people outside your immediate area can’t browse here.”

Homosexuality just isn’t unlawful in China, with sexual acts between same-sex companions decriminalized in 1997. Nevertheless, the nation has no authorized protections based mostly on residents’ sexuality and a 2020 report from Stonewall described LGBT folks as “largely invisible and neglected in [Chinese] society.” China’s authorities has increasingly censored homosexual communities in recent times, with officers decrying “the feminization of male adolescents” by well-liked tradition.

Grindr was beforehand owned by Chinese tech agency Beijing Kunlun Tech from 2018 to 2020, however was bought for roughly $608.5 million after a US authorities committee urged its possession could possibly be a safety concern. Just final month, it was reported that the app was faraway from China’s iOS and Android app shops.