Fri 27 Mar 2009 In: International News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Apple's popular iPhone has been flooded with thousands of possible applications to its users to download - some of them useful, many of them not - and now a gay dating application has launched in America. "Meet guys on your iPhone with Grindr," says the blurb on iTunes. "Gay, bi, curious, or just checking things out? Grindr is the location-based way for you to find men who are looking for other men." "The iPhone already uses GPS to recommend nearby restaurants and locate your friends; finding circle jerk buddies was only a logical next step," concludes cheeky Amercian gay blog Queerty. The service, billed as free, discrete and easy-to-use, allows its users to publish profiles of themselves and browse other users' profiles, like on regular internet dating services. "While privacy is an issue for all location based social networks, it is of the utmost importance on gay networks," notes the Washington Post. "Without proper security measures, bigots could easily download such applications and use them to pinpoint targets for hateful slurs and potentially even violence. "Grindr deals with these issues by obscuring a user's absolute location by default. Rather than plotting each user on the map. Grindr displays how far away they are (distances can range from a few feet to miles away)."
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News Staff
First published: Friday, 27th March 2009 - 12:05pm