In the baroque architecture of digital capitalism, where every click becomes currency, and every swipe a confession, we discover that even our most private desires have been catalogued, cross-referenced, and monetised. The latest revelation—that TikTok allegedly tracked Grindr users’ activity without consent—reads less like a privacy scandal than an inevitable chapter in the ongoing chronicle of corporate overreach. It appears that Grindr and TikTok, helped by AppsFlyer, started direct surveillance as part of this overreach.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
We are grateful!
Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
The mechanism, as detailed by the Vienna-based watchdog organisation Noyb (None of your business), possesses an almost perverse elegance. Through the Israeli tracking company AppsFlyer, TikTok reportedly monitored users’ behaviour on the LGBTQ dating platform, constructing shadow profiles that could divine sexual orientation and intimate habits—precisely the kind of ‘particularly sensitive’ data that European law explicitly protects. One affected user only learned of this surveillance after formally requesting his own data from TikTok, a discovery that carries the unsettling quality of finding hidden cameras in one’s bedroom.
What makes this case particularly troubling is not merely the violation itself, but what it reveals about the evolving sophistication of data extraction. We have moved beyond the crude harvesting of information within a single platform. Now, as Noyb lawyer Kleanthi Sardeli observes, companies like TikTok are ‘increasingly collecting data from other apps and sources,’ weaving disparate threads of our digital lives into comprehensive tapestries of who we are, what we desire, and whom we love.
The irony is sharp: Grindr exists partly because mainstream society has historically forced LGBTQ individuals into spaces where they could connect safely, away from judgment. Now that refuge has been turned into a surveillance mechanism, the very act of seeking community is transformed into data points for corporate profit.
This is not TikTok’s first transgression. Ireland fined the company €530 million in May for transferring European users’ data to China. Grindr (also Chinese-owned forced to sell on US market, like TikTok), too, paid nearly six million euros in 2021 for sharing sensitive information with third parties. The pattern suggests that fines have become merely the cost of doing business—moral hazard dressed in regulatory language. Here we cannot help but see a pattern of Israel-China-USA collaboration.
Since 2018, organisations like Noyb have fought a Sisyphean battle, filing complaints against Meta, Google, and TikTok, attempting to enforce rules that these corporations seem to regard as optional. The GDPR was supposed to be Europe’s answer to digital colonialism, a legislative bulwark against American tech imperialism. Yet here we are, still discovering that our most intimate moments are being tracked, traded, and analysed.
What blows my mind is that the most dangerous companies—those that have been proven to put our lives in danger and push our democracies into peril—are the most widely used ones.
The question is no longer whether these violations will continue to occur, but whether the penalties will ever be severe enough to matter. Until then, what happens on Grindr—and everywhere else—remains very much the property of those watching.
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