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I helped build Grindr, which of course I don't think was unethical. But I've been surprised by some people's reaction to it. It generally comes up in some conve
by powvans 8y ago
I helped build Grindr, which of course I don't think was unethical. But I've been surprised by some people's reaction to it. It generally comes up in some conversation where someone asks "what have you worked on that I might have heard of?" Occasionally they follow up with (paraphrasing) "how do you sleep at night?"
- knuththetruth 8y agoOut of curiosity - was this because of their homophobia or something else? I’ve read they’ve been terrible about data security.
- powvans 8y agoThe former. I wondered if the comment might be misconstrued. These were cases of individuals revealing their prejudices.
- austhrow743 8y agoGrindr the service isn't unethical but I recall a thing about them having a lot of third party tracking. Which given the nature of the service seems to me way worse than tracking elsewhere on the internet. Know anything about that or the extent of it?
- powvans 8y agoI don't know anything about the current architecture or third party trackers. It's been over five years since I did any work with Grindr. I will say that when I worked on Grindr, Joel (CEO, founder) was adamant that we would not track location history. We only stored the most recent location we received from a user.
- puzzle 8y agoYou're not a current or former Google employee, are you? There's the legend of the engineer who was a Grindr user and helped them to scale their code (it ran on App Engine, at least at the time).
- ender89 8y agoI believe the correct response to that is "sandwiched between two burly gay men I met on grindr".
- dschep 8y agoWell they did leak their users' HIV status[0]. That's pretty unethical IMO. [0] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17189078/grindr-hiv-status-data-sharing-privacy https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17189078/grindr-hiv-status-data...