Grindr turns off location services in Olympic village – MASHAHER

Gay dating app Grindr has turned off location services in the Olympic village to protect athletes’ privacy. 

After some app users posted on social media last week that they were not able to use the “explore” function to find other profiles in the area, Grindr confirmed in a blog post that it had disabled its location-based features for the Olympic village, where competing athletes are staying in Paris. 

“If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them on the app,” the post read.

Grindr turned off its “explore” and “roam” features within the village, and turned off the “show distance” feature by default, but allows users to share an approximate distance if they choose to turn it on.

It also disabled private videos and screenshots for profile images and in-chat media, and turned on unlimited disappearing messages, among other privacy features. 

Grindr imposed the same restrictions at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

WATCH | Drag queen calls out hypocrisy of ‘Last Supper’ backlash:

Drag queen calls out hypocrisy of Olympics Last Supper backlash

Hugo Bardin, who performs as drag queen Paloma, says there’s a double standard over the controversy around the Olympic opening ceremony sketch resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. The tableau featured drag performers, drawing ire of some Christian groups.

Jérémy Goupille, co-chair of the Olympic queer community hub Pride House, said in previous Games people have tried to expose athletes who are not officially out by checking heights, weights and locations of people on dating apps.

“You have to protect them because so many bad people exist. At the same time, there are so many beautiful athletes,” Goupille said. “They want to meet someone and it’s difficult.”

The Daily Beast published in article in 2016 for which a reporter, who identified as heterosexual, used the app at the Rio Olympics and included information about athletes he matched with. 

Facing backlash, the publication ultimately took down the article and issued an apology “to the athletes who may have been inadvertently compromised by our story.”

The Paris Olympics have broken a record by having 193 openly 2SLGBTQ+ athletes competing, according to Outsports, a website compiling a database of openly queer Olympians. That surpasses 186 athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Outsports co-founder Jim Buzinski said when the site started tracking athletes at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, they counted only around five who were openly 2SLGBTQ+.