Grindr pays £26 m to settle claim it leaked users’ HIV status

London‑based LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr has agreed to pay £26 million to settle a lawsuit that accused it of unlawfully sharing users’ personal data, including HIV test results, with third‑party analytics firms.

The class action, initially filed in the UK High Court, was later served in the United States, with a law firm representing more than 11,000 claimants. Grindr’s settlement, announced in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, calls for two payments of £13 million each – the first by 31 December and the second by 31 March 2027 – and states that it does not admit liability.

The complaint alleges that Grindr, before 2020, when it was owned by Chinese company Kunlun, shared sensitive data such as user ethnicity, sexual orientation, HIV status and recent test dates with analytics providers Apptimize and Localytics. Those partners could use the data to tailor advertising campaigns to users.

The company had previously defended the data sharing as industry‑standard in 2018 but now says it discontinued providing HIV data to the analytics partners. In 2020 it claimed the practice was overhauled to improve privacy controls for its user community.

Regulators have hit Grindr before: Norway’s data protection watchdog fined the company £5.5 million in 2020, and the UK Information Commissioner’s Office reprimanded it later that year for data‑practice violations.

In a statement, Grindr said it recognises the “significant distress” its users experienced in the pre‑2020 period, but it stresses that its privacy strategy has been substantially revised since then and remains a safe space for its community.

For further context: Read the full SEC filing or view the related stories about Grindr’s data practices here.