![priest gay dating app priest gay dating app](https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3903062.1558693783!/image/image.jpg)
Yet Grindr has gotten in trouble for privacy issues in the recent past. “There is no meaningful oversight of smartphone surveillance, and the privacy abuse we saw in this case is enabled by a profitable and booming industry.”įor its part, Grindr told the Washington Post that “there is absolutely no evidence supporting the allegations of improper data collection or usage related to the Grindr app as purported” and that it was “infeasible from a technical standpoint and incredibly unlikely.” “The harms caused by location tracking are real and can have a lasting impact far into the future,” Sean O’Brien, principal researcher at ExpressVPN’s Digital Security Lab, told Recode. Considering that data can be used to ruin or even end your life - being gay is punishable by death in some countries - the consequences of mishandling it are as severe as it gets. That data is usually supposed to be “anonymized” or “de-identified” - this is how apps and data brokers claim to respect privacy - but it can be pretty easy to re-identify that data, as multiple investigations have shown, and as privacy experts and advocates have warned about for years. What we do know is this: Dating apps are a rich source of personal and sensitive info about their users, and those users rarely know how that data is used, who can access it, and how those third parties use that data or who else they sell it to or share it with. Regardless, it was damning enough that Burrill left his position over it, and the Pillar says it’s possible that Burrill will face “canonical discipline” as well.
![priest gay dating app priest gay dating app](https://www.out.com/sites/default/files/2013/06/20/GayPriestR.jpg)
The report, which presents Burrill’s apparent use of a gay dating app as “serial sexual misconduct” and inaccurately conflates homosexuality and dating app usage with pedophilia, simply says it was “commercially available app signal data” obtained from “data vendors.” We don’t know who those vendors are, nor the circumstances around that data’s purchase. There’s still a lot we don’t know here, including the source of the Pillar’s data. Burrill resigned his position shortly before the Pillar published its investigation. Here’s what happened: A Catholic news outlet called the Pillar somehow obtained “app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr.” It used this to track a phone belonging to or used by Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who was an executive officer of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It also shows the need for real regulations on the data broker industry that knows so much about so many but is beholden to so few laws.
![priest gay dating app priest gay dating app](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/05/20/14/vicar.jpg)
It can then have dire consequences for users who may have had no idea their data was being collected and sold in the first place.
![priest gay dating app priest gay dating app](https://wgbh.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/493818c/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1644x1300+0+2/resize/525x415!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwgbh-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F13%2F45%2Ff6011f4142019836a268ad5dde96%2Ftraffickingproject-9-4x5.jpg)
It shows how, despite app developers’ and data brokers’ frequent assurances that the data they collect is “anonymized” to protect people’s privacy, this data can and does fall into the wrong hands. No federal laws prohibit buying this data, said Jennifer King, a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.One of the worst-case scenarios for the barely regulated and secretive location data industry has become reality: Supposedly anonymous gay dating app data was apparently sold off and linked to a Catholic priest, who then resigned from his job. It’s possible for experts to de-anonymize some of this data and connect it to real people. While the information is typically stripped of obviously identifying fields, like a user’s name or phone number, it can contain everything from age and gender to a device ID. Catholic teaching opposes sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage.Ī spokeswoman for Grindr described the Pillar’s story as “homophobic” and denied that the data described in it could be publicly accessed.Privacy experts have long raised concerns about “anonymized” data collected by apps and sold to or shared with aggregators and marketing companies. Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill has since last fall been the general secretary of the USCCB, a position that coordinates all administrative work and planning for the conference, which is the country’s network for Catholic bishops. Some privacy experts said that they couldn’t recall other instances of phone data being de-anonymized and reported publicly, but that it’s not illegal and will likely happen more as people come to understand what data is available about others. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after a Catholic media site told the conference it had access to cellphone data that appeared to show he was a regular user of Grindr, the queer dating app, and frequented gay bars.