People looking for love with an Olympic athlete could have a difficult time this year: Grindr, the LGBTQ2S+ dating app, has disabled some of its location-sharing features to protect athletes from harassment or prosecution.
Some users noticed this week that they can’t use the “Explore” feature on the app at the Olympic Village in Paris, which lets people change their location and look at profiles.
That’s by design, Grindr confirmed. The company explained in a blog post that for an athlete who isn’t out or comes from a country with strict LGBTQ2S+ laws, using the app “can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them.” The app can still be used by people in the Village, even though some location services will be disabled.
Roughly 155 LGBTQ2S+ athletes are attending the Olympics in Paris, according to OutSports, which is a small fraction of the more than 10,000 attending the games.
The company is making other changes for the Olympic Village: For example, profiles default to revealing how far away someone is with the “show distance” feature. That feature can be enabled but will default to “off” for users in the Village, and other venues. Grindr said that change is to “help athletes connect without worrying about unintentionally revealing their whereabouts or being recognized.”
During the two-week event, Grindr is also letting users in the Village send unlimited disappearing messages or unsend messages for free. Those are features typically the app charges for. Sending private videos and disabling screenshots have also been temporarily disabled if used in that radius.
“Our goal is to help athletes connect without worrying about unintentionally revealing their whereabouts or being recognized,” Grindr said, adding that it made similar restrictions at previous games.
Grindr started clamping down on its features during the Olympics after 2016, when a heterosexual Daily Beast writer reported on using Grindr to meet athletes in the Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro. The story, which was deleted, drew angry accusations that the writer had outed gay athletes, whom he didn’t identify by name but had descriptions of them.
Grindr (GRND) recently announced ambitious growth plans to shake off its hook-up reputation with new tools that it hopes users find long-term relationships and recommend in-person events. The stock is up more than 30 per cent for the year.