Inside 18 months of turmoil at Grindr, which some former employees say began with its sale to Chinese company Kunlun Group and elevation of Scott Chen
instances in which users flagged content or interactions that potentially violated the company's terms of service — from Grindr's internal systems.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... @mathewrodriguez : Around INTO's demise was when my anxiety symptoms became unbearable. By January, I was in therapy (and still am.) Reading this was hard, but it's important people learn from Grindr's (many) mistakes. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Carrie A. Goldberg / @cagoldberglaw : False. Grindr was committed to being horrible well before the sale to Chinese. @MatthewSHerrick @TorEkelandPLLC https://twitter.com/... Eva / @evacide : It turns out that moving extremely personal data about millions of gay men to Beijing is not a good idea. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... @michael__mayday : anyways, this is a really, really important read because it portends *a lot* of issues that both companies and users are going to have to face and are wholly unprepared for. read. it. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Josh Barro / @jbarro : The idea that Grindr faced a business imperative to pivot toward being a media company strikes me as completely nuts, unless their goal was to lose money. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/OmeqQngNh2 Kate Taylor / @kate_h_taylor : uhhhhhhh https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/5KkyoXyztj @rzhongnotes : 'Pitched as a way to break into the Chinese market and keep China and other Asian customer data in the country, the separate app was immediately flagged by executives because it hadn't been approved by CFIUS. Many also shared ethical concerns.' https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This investigation lands mid-arc for Grindr: the app had already been caught sharing users' HIV status and last-tested dates with two other firms in 2018, and by March 2019 its owner Beijing Kunlun was seeking to sell after a US government panel raised concerns about Chinese ownership.
What turned concern into a forced exit was reporting that Kunlun gave some engineers in Beijing access to user data, prompting US officials to require a sale. This piece adds the internal view from that period — former employees date the turmoil to the Kunlun sale and Scott Chen's elevation, while attorney Carrie Goldberg argues the problems predate the deal entirely.
First-order effects
- The people affected right now are Grindr's users and ex-staff: internal records show flagged content and interactions that potentially violated the terms of service, and executives separately flagged an app for China because it had not been approved by CFIUS.
- Accountability for the era is actively contested — Carrie Goldberg publicly rejects the claim that Grindr's problems began with the Chinese sale, saying the company was committed to being horrible well before it.
Second-order effects
- The forced divestiture does not cleanly sever Kunlun: the investor group that won US approval to buy Grindr reportedly has financial and personal links to Beijing Kunlun Tech, keeping the ownership question alive for US reviewers.
- Each privacy lapse compounds into a commercial liability — after the HIV-data disclosure and the Beijing data-access report, user trust becomes a pricing and retention problem for whichever owner inherits the app.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, apps holding sensitive personal data under foreign ownership become standing CFIUS targets, with national-security reviews treating dating-app data much like other strategic assets.
- Post-sale monetization pressure points toward riskier products rather than trust repair: by 2024 Grindr was planning an AI chatbot for sexual conversations that could be trained on opt-in user data, extending the same revenue-versus-trust tension into a new technology.
The trend: Foreign ownership of consumer apps holding sensitive personal data is becoming a national-security trigger, with CFIUS-driven divestitures that do not always fully separate the original owner.