An investigation details how a group of conservative Colorado Catholics spent millions to buy mobile app tracking data to identify priests using gay dating apps
Context & Ripple Effects
This investigation extends a pattern the coverage has tracked since 2021, when a Catholic media site used broker-purchased data to force the resignation of a top US Church official over alleged Grindr use. The new reporting shows the same playbook scaled up: a private group of Colorado Catholics spending millions to buy mobile app tracking data and run it against priests in their own pews.
First-order effects
- Priests in Colorado dioceses are the immediate targets — their dating app usage and movements were identifiable to a private group with money but no legal authority, and Grindr's repeated claim that broker-shared data is encrypted and unidentifiable is directly contradicted by another successful deanonymization.
Second-order effects
- Dating apps and the brokers who resell their location data face renewed scrutiny from users and Church institutions alike, since the same supply chain that served a Catholic media outlet in 2021 now serves vigilante buyers; the precedent also echoes the military's purchase of granular movement data from everyday apps, showing government and private buyers drawing on the same market.
Third-order effects
- If commercial location data remains cheaply purchasable, surveillance capability effectively transfers from states to any funded private group — religious, political, or personal — pointing toward regulatory pressure on the broker ecosystem and on apps' anonymization claims as the only structural fix.
The trend: Commercially available mobile location data is turning private surveillance into a purchasable service, letting non-state actors replicate intelligence-gathering once reserved for governments.