In 2015, a man who had been arrested for having sex with a 13-year-old boy sued Grindr, claiming that its weak enforcement of age restrictions was to blame for the sexual encounter. Age verification through social media is hardly foolproof, since minors can lie about their age on Facebook, too. When asked to comment, Grindr’s chief technology officer and president, Scott Chen, said that Grindr is “in the process of testing further safeguards for our account creation procedures to help ensure authentic and proper account activity, including verification through social media platforms.” He said the company takes the issue very seriously, is working on improving its screening tools and encourages users to continue reporting any “illegal or improper activity.” This would require employees to manually verify which conversations were inappropriate, but given that Grindr’s annual revenue may be as high as $77 million, the company could probably afford it. Grindr could also use algorithms to detect conversations between minors and adults. But this brings up confidentiality risks for gay men who don’t want to be outed. Some gambling sites, for instance, make users upload a credit card or ID to prove their age. But it could certainly do more to try to verify ages. Grindr’s terms of service state that users must be 18 or older, and the app requires everyone to enter a birth date to join.
