Utopia or Optimisation?: Grindr and the Data Dilemma
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Chase Ledin
Summary: In April 2018, Grindr shared user data to develop online public-health services. Does Grindr’s data disclosure infringe upon users’ right to privacy? Should Grindr create a detailed “map” of its optimisation process? This article explores Grindr’s utopian idealisms and the ethics of optimisation.
Grindr Billboard
The first week of April 2018 brought a firestorm upon the popular gay social app, Grindr. A Buzzfeedarticle, “Grindr is Letting Other Companies See User HIV Status and Location Data,” exposed the disclosure of users’ HIV information to third-party developers, sparking international outrage. The release of this highly-sensitive data opened significant discussion about the efficacy and ethical deployment of Grindr’s role as a facilitator of gay sexual health. This unsurprising and altogether common data-sharing practice shook user trust, questioning the validity of Grindr’s security as the “world’s largest social networking app for GBTQ people.” The utopian belief that Grindr could bring together the many disparate populations of queer folk fractured beneath its neoliberal thrust toward expansion. At a moment marked by systemic anxiety about data disclosure, Grindr’s optimisation of queer health weakened the barrier between its aspirations of community development and its totalizing sexual markets. In essence, Grindr surpassed its utopian facade and exposed its market tactics.
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Grindr has since agreed to isolate users’ information within company-only protocol, but it failed to provide an extensive plan to confront future scandals and undermine theories of unethical data dissemination. The company’s foresight, like many social media giants, focuses on the individual consumer. For this reason, Grindr’s social model remains entangled in the public and private spheres of the market. Interpretation of the company’s data usage depends upon the relationship between social interactions in the private sphere and community development in the public sphere. Thus if there is a “crisis of de-privatisation,” as Buzzfeedsuggests, it derives from Grindr’s failure to state its goal to merge users’ public and private experiences through optimisation--or the standardization of individuals who become “quality controlled” product on the sexual market. The intentional merging of the public and private is precisely the argument social media giants, like Mark Zuckerburg, utilise and exactly the ethical protocol they fail to elucidate.
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Grindr’s optimisation goal--to merge the public and private spheres--requires a clear map of the global expansion of gay life. Grindr’s data dissemination “scandal” creates the illusion of an ethical crisis insofar as the event illuminates Grindr’s presence in public and private digital spheres but its intentions remain opaque in order to expand the “sexual market” of individual users. The crisis at hand is simply a renewed request to analyse the validity of Grindr’s “sexual market” across public and private spheres. Aggravated critics responded in opposition to the data disclosure to demand a transparent map of the company’s free-market objectives. It is Grindr’s responsibility, they argue, to rewrite its discursive output in order to debunk the myth of the crisis of privatization by claiming corporate expansion. Is it possible for Grindr to fill in the ambiguities of the public/private spheres, and can Grindr draw up a resolution to the presumed crisis of (global) public/privacy mergers?
"the idyllic space of Grindr is the new Athens: a smorgasbord of racial, economic, gender, and sexual backgrounds coexisting in the realm of instant contact."
Grindr denied selling information to third-party developers, claiming its data disclosure was part of an effort to personalize technology, particularly in response to rising HIV transmission rates across the globe. To do this, the company collaborated with developers to provide a clear service for its users: a digital system to encourage regular sexual health check-ups. The reminders ask a user to input the month of last check-up and select notifications on a three-month or six-month scale.
This process, Grindr argued, provides a helpful tool to test regularly and aims to draw attention to personalised sexual wellbeing, especially during renewed escalations of HIV transmissions. But at a time when alldata sharing is under intense investigation, critics question whether Grindr should covertly optimise gay health by facilitating a digital clinic under the guise of sexual utopia? To answer this question, we must look at the layers of utopian and neoliberal ideologies at work in Grindr’s corporate vision.
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Grindr’s platform engenders utopian ideologies on the surface of its neoliberal machinery. Users engage with a community of like- or similar-identified people looking for chat, dates, friends, networking, a relationship, and/or right now. Users can select partners based on needs specified in individual profiles; they can also filter other users via “My Type,” “Online Now,” “Photos Only,” and “Haven’t Chatted Today.” In an effort to provide a global network, Grindr also allows users to “Explore” the world, and, with a premium account, users can find other users in cities across the world. Largely, Grindr provides a space where gay users of a multitude of identifications can meet online and offline, in order to facilitate relations in the intimacy of the home or the immediacy of the bar. Grindr bolsters an ambitious vision of connecting digital users to a 24/7 queer community where any user can participate in socratic dialogue or get dirty in the sheets at a moment’s notice. In short, the idyllic space of Grindr is the new Athens: a smorgasbord of racial, economic, gender, and sexual backgrounds coexisting in the realm of instant contact.
Though Grindr has taken up the noble cause of idyllic queer contact, its intentions are not utopian in practice. Grindr’s optimisation process homogenises queer experiences by standardising behaviour through an economic model. The digital network supplants the services bars, discos, bathhouses, and gay resorts once provided, by capitalizing on social and sexual desires in consumer context, and sustains a lucrative market of queer consumers willing to buy into the “premiums” of queer community. Grindr oversees the efficiency, efficacy, and moralisms of queer life on a global scale to provide for consumer needs. Especially through the use of direct intervention (HIV notifications) and indirect intervention (articles, lobbying, rhetorical campaigns to challenge hate speech, etc.), Grindr corporatizes queer values by personalising consumer needs within the ever-expanding global market. By capitalising on community values, Grindr has devised a model that enables user accessibility to the global market (of bodies, community, networking, etc.) while supplying an ambiguous (and addictive) ethical code.
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Los Angeles Pride, 2010
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A utopian model would dictate strict moral codes for its communities. What makes Grindr a wolf in sheep’s clothing is its avoidance of prescribing behaviour--choosing, instead, to influence and mediate consumer interests in the neoliberal market. This choice alters how users choose to engage with romantic, sexual, and platonic partners, requiring individuals--and not community members--to decide how they wish to identify, how they wish to behave, and how they choose to select and consume the “products” of Grindr’s services. Grindr designates “appropriate” content by screening users’ profile photos and establishing ​algorithmic codes to personalize individual sexual experiences, often in spite of accepted community practices of sexual well-being. The company models free association and sexual contact akin to public interaction and places responsibility on the individual. Through free association, consumers can engage in “real life” encounters, allowing for a variety of personal investments and desires, regardless of cultural mores. Moreover, this practice of free association creates a foothold that allows for myriad and negotiable modes of consumer engagement. Free association, then, serves as the foundation for Grindr’s ethical code and its baseline for shaping consumer conduct.
Critics respond to such free association by decrying Grindr’s neoliberal underpinnings as rudimentary elements of a datascape. One such argument suggests a lack of sufficient community standards and/or ethical practices, which, this argument suggests, has enabled the “crisis of privatisation” and a lack of community development. In response to this claim, Grindr has developed services that generalise human behaviour across cultures, confronting cross-cultural issues such as rising transmissions of HIV and gay marriage. For some users, this has been necessary for the cohesion of an effective digital and “real life” queer community on a global scale. For others, Grindr has risked polarizing users within this model by mining personal data and creating an exhaustive consumer profile (that is, isolating the individual from social, cultural, historical, and behavioural development). No matter the stance on the issue, Grindr’s optimisation places individual experience before utopian ideologies.
As we have already learned, Grindr’s community ethics consolidate individual sexual health within a consumer profile. Grindr is in the business of data disclosure in order to individualise user experience. By optimising user desires, Grindr brings consumers together from across the globe to interact and engage as they see fit. Largely, Grindr seeks to retain the “human” element of a distinctly economic transaction. As its website describes, the company’s mission is to “promote justice, health, safety, and more for LGBTQ individuals around the globe. Our wide-ranging initiatives impact communities large and small on issues...from the bedroom to the courtroom and beyond.” Grindr incorporates social ideologies into its business model, substantiating an attempt to define a “shared” community ethics. It maintains a vision of the community’s well-being by capitalizing on social issues that matter most to its users while pushing for increasing “premium encounters.” In effect, Grindr distinguishes users as sexual and queer consumers of social issues, throwing down roots in community development, while increasing its desire to collect fees for its optimal community encounters.
Grindr encourages “optimal” and “premium” encounters. At this market juncture, Grindr is on the verge of developing a market of “responsible” public and private choices. Grindr, as facilitator of the private and public spheres, poses two options to this question. First, it allows for unfettered objectification of the body (in a distinctly economic mode) by allowing individuals to tailor their experiences without significant monitoring. Second, the company incorporates national and global ideologies about gay life in order
Grindr’s merging of these public and private experiences situates the gay consumer at the threshold of digital activist (“I paid my dues”) and sexual capitalist (“I paid for my intimacy”).
to market the social media app as an ideal “queer friendly” space. In the former, users engage directly with human bodies and “transpose” their marketability upon others, making selections based on height, weight, HIV status, age, and image(s). In the latter, users engage in an ideological movement toward the de-privatisation of queer life (or the “queer digital commune”) and the glance toward idealistic conditions for queer folk and their cultural desires. While the former often occurs between individuals or groups in private spaces (but not always), the latter precipitates a global, public politics that brings the user into the public sphere. In this way, Grindr effortlessly merges the politics of pleasure and activism as users engage in the socialization and pleasures of queer life. More importantly, Grindr’s merging of these public and private experiences situates the gay consumer at the threshold of digital activist (“I paid my dues”) and sexual capitalist (“I paid for my intimacy”).
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The crisis of disclosure places Grindr with one foot in economic growth and the other in individual rights. Grindr’s ethical issue is located at the intersection of its commitment to its trustees and the users who turn on the app to access the global community. If it pushes too far to the left, it risks polarizing the people who seek to extract value from its corporate model. If it pushes too far to the right, it risks isolating the users who enable its existence. The crisis is not as simple as arguing that Grindr should cut off data disclosure, since this means siphoning technological advancement and stagnating the company’s market value. At the same time as we fear the publicisation of our private lives, we must develop a critical understanding of how optimisation incorporates user’s historical, cultural, and social elements within the company’s public and private transactions. Failure to delineate the varying forms of Grindr’s market tactics engenders a total economic mode that reduces the consumer to a component of a fabricated digital system. To remedy the confusion of its dual public/private model, and dissuade the potential ambiguity of sexual interactions are purely market commodification, Grindr must delineate the overlap of its public and private obligations, undertaking a discursive shift to claim ownership over its (ostensibly utopian) vision(s) of community development.
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To map its development tactics, Grindr must demarcate its neoliberal and utopian objectives to illuminate its trajectory toward a “progressive” culture of queer consumers. Grindr, in essence, maintains a future-oriented investment in queer consumers. Grindr’s corporate model is utopian in theory because it envisions a perfect sexual (and healthy) society for its users. It falls short of its utopian impulse and remains a neoliberal market because it forces assimilation and integration under digital facilitation and removes the “queer commune” by intensifying the position of the user as individual. Grindr’s model is neoliberal in the sense that its value systems prioritize monetary investment (through paid subscription and optimisation of consumer profiles) and thus centralizes its priorities as a titan of queer industry. Grindr’s corporate model aligns with the “progressive” tendencies of an ever-expanding market; its goal is, first and foremost, to supplement and advance the initiatives (and dreams) of queer life at multiple levels of investment within the expansion of global capitalism.
At present, Grindr claims to provide such support across many of personalized areas and capitalizes on social justice initiatives to bolster the lives of LGBTQ folk and their communities. For instance, the company subgroup “Grindr for Equality” campaigns for voting rights, PrEP, HIV education, and LGBTQ refugees. Through these projects, Grindr intentionally tackles social problems in the community and makes a concerted effort to provide education through pop-ups and pull-out news items in the app. Grindr uses its digital platform to take the lead on important “queer” issues through lobbying and develops targeted educational campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. In this way, Grindr utilizes a value system of targeted consumers to bolster community ideologies. Yet, its community development initiatives are emblazened with the infamous yellow mask, obfuscating the utopian ideal of the queer commune (Grindr’s ideal society) with a capitalist stamp.
Screenshots from Grindr: how to "personalise" your experience
This corporate entity is under pressure to determine its protocol for users who demand total (data) privacy while assimilating community values. Such a re-mapping of its neoliberal priorities will not satisfy the utopian impulse, but it may create better conditions for queer folk at large. Because Grindr has direct access to the majority of queer communities in developed countries, it has significant control over what types of community behaviours take place. Grindr teeters on the edge of becoming a harbinger of moral instruction in the name ofeconomic development, and can provide a loud voice in the market. By engaging in social community development, Grindr can create clear messages about the boundaries of trans-historical behaviours and suggest how future communities can interact and engage, thus moving toward its utopian aims. Such an organisation feels a pull toward preserving the borders, social conventions, and integrity of utopian community rights. It also considers the values of on-demand users and their desire to remove themselves from the “scene” after chance encounters. Grindr, then, must cruise into the queer future by clarifying its well-being model as a harbinger of community health and the establishment of a “real life” and digital community that is permanent as a market entity.
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The overlap of public and private community development can create the illusion of an ethical dilemma the moment an organisation slips too far in either direction. Grindr has an obligation to consider whether to continue to optimise users’ experiences for the sake of its consumerist model or if it has an obligation to develop the public/private ethical model at the core of queer community. If Grindr chooses to extricate its utopian impulse (i.e. shaping queer conduct and community values), it risks losing a variety of users who utilize the platform for queer world-making and community bonding. At the same time, Grindr must be wary of standardising the queer experience into a totalizing and objective economy of bodies, as this will only increase the objectification of bodies by turning the human body into a market commodity. In order to preserve its obligations to queer folk, Grindr must provide its users optimal and unlimited opportunities to connect and build shared communities while reminding users of the utility of their engagement: the digital space that is both public and private, a space where one can develop identity that is both future oriented and economically lucrative. Grindr must consolidate the culmination of its various (often fabulous) parts on a global scale to rectify the ambiguities of its misunderstood influence over community development--only then can users can locate their investment in a global community that commits itself to economic and cultural wellbeing.
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