Grindr? it’s a “Blackmailer’s goldmine”! The weaponization of queer data publics Amid the US

Abstract

In March 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) identified Grindr, a hookup app that predominantly caters to men who have sex with men, as a “national security threat” and compelled the Chinese conglomerate Kunlun Tech to divest from it entirely. The CFIUS-Grindr ruling is indicative of larger regulatory debates over increasing datafication trends in the dating app industry. Through a political economy approach to communication, this paper examines how this ruling was predominantly constructed by various stakeholders as a public controversy in light of the ongoing US–China trade conflict. This interpretation of the controversy relies on a prejudicial trope that construes queer dating app users as vulnerable targets of potential blackmail schemes operated by Chinese intelligence agencies. Through the Lavender Scare, a historical period referring to state-led investigations into the presence of LGBTQ+ employees in Western federal workforces, this paper historicizes this blackmail trope to highlight how the politicization of queer vulnerabilities amid global hegemonic conflicts is a tactic that predates the US-China trade conflict. It argues that the CFIUS-Grindr ruling weaponizes Grindr’s queer data publics as threats against which the US government should protect itself, while failing to fully recognize the urgency for the state to protect the data privacy rights of the LGBTQ+ communities in the digital economy. In light of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling, this paper examines the implications that datafication raises for the LGBTQ+ communities whose sexual lives and identities are increasingly being datafied and exploited by digital media platforms.

Keywords

Datafication Grindr lavender scare LGBTQ+ communities US–China trade conflict

March 2019 marked a turning point for Grindr, a hookup app that predominantly caters to men who have sex with men. Just 2 days after the 10th anniversary of the app’s launch, Reuters was the first news agency to report that an obscure federal committee, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), had compelled the Chinese conglomerate Beijing Kunlun Wanwei Technology Co Ltd (or Kunlun Tech for short) to divest from Grindr LLC (O’Donnell et al., 2019). Kunlun Tech had legally acquired Grindr between 2016 and 2018 but was now forced to sell the app at auction by June 2020 for it to continue its operations on US soil. The ruling had immediate and resounding effects in the realm of global trade, as it was one of the very first occurrences in history where the United States went against a foreign investor by retroactively reversing a business deal that had closed a year prior. In the press, sources close to the matter claimed that CFIUS had formally identified Grindr as a “national security threat,” a label that sparked speculations over potential data malpractice at Grindr under its new Chinese leadership (Mac, 2019). CFIUS allegedly shared concerns over the possibility that the Chinese government had accessed, through Grindr, the sensitive data of tens of thousands of US military and government personnel, which includes users’ sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual preferences, private pictures, geolocation, and HIV status.

The CFIUS-Grindr ruling is indicative of larger regulatory debates over increasing datafication trends in the dating app industry (Wilken et al., 2019) and the tech industry more broadly (Van Dijck, 2014). Through a political economy approach to communication (Wasko, 2004), this paper examines how the ruling was constructed by various stakeholders as a public controversy pertaining to Internet governance and global trade. As I detail below, public debates have predominantly interpreted the ruling in light of the ongoing trade conflict between the United States and China (Kokas, 2018). This framing labels Grindr as a threat to national security by construing queer dating app users as targets particularly vulnerable to potential blackmail schemes deployed by Chinese intelligence agencies. In this paper, I offer an alternative reading of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling to highlight how the weaponization of queer vulnerabilities amid global hegemonic conflicts is a political tactic that predates the US–China trade conflict. To do so, I draw on the Lavender Scare, a historical period that saw the systematic monitoring and firing of thousands of LGBTQ+ federal employees in Western countries through the use of a similar blackmail trope (Johnson, 2004).

By analyzing the CFIUS-Grindr ruling through the lens of the Lavender Scare, this paper seeks to historicize some of the implications that datafication raises for the LGBTQ+ communities whose sexual lives and identities are increasingly being datafied by digital media platforms. It underscores how the CFIUS-Grindr ruling should not be understood as a step toward queer data rights protection in the digital economy. On the contrary, the ruling conceals a persistent prejudicial trope that depicts LGBTQ+ people as potential threats against which the US government should protect itself, while failing to recognize the urgency for the state to protect the LGBTQ+ communities against the threats posed by digital media platforms and the datafication schemes they operate. This paper concludes by reflecting on the need for the LGBTQ+ communities to determine who can benefit, both commercially and politically, from the datafication of their intimate lives.

Sexual datafication and the constitution of queer data publics

In the past decade, dating and hookup apps have introduced affordances that have reconfigured the landscape of digitally mediated dating and sexual cultures (Albury et al., 2017; Duguay, 2017). One of the most important innovations brought on by those apps is their capacity to geolocate user activities as they interact on the move¹ (Licoppe, 2016). Geographical data that pertain to a person’s address, postal code, or city, have always been collected by professional dating services. This makes sense, as geographical proximity is often a very important criterion used when selecting a romantic or sexual partner. Dating and hookup apps amplify the spatial nature of matchmaking by implementing geolocation techniques that are automated, systematic, and finely integrated into their operating model (Blackwell et al., 2015). This is best illustrated by Grindr’s catchphrase “Zero feet away,” which points to the cultural significance of physical proximity and immediacy in queer hookup cultures and, nowadays, in more mainstream dating cultures as well (Roth, 2016).

Geolocation techniques are crucial commodities in the dating app industry for at least two reasons (De Ridder, 2021; Myles, 2020). First, they inform recommendation algorithms whose objective is to pair users based on their proximity, among other discriminating criteria, like sociodemographic characteristics and common interests. Whether it is through Tinder’s swipe function or Grindr’s grid interface, geolocation techniques geared at simulating or supporting physical proximity are embedded within dating and hookup apps as central features. Second, geolocation techniques play an important part in the business models developed by dating and hookup apps, as they help transform user activities into spatially located data. Apps like Grindr systematically break down intimate practices into key data points that are mined, aggregated, and curated into very large datasets (Wilken et al., 2019). This refers to datafication, that is, the process through which digital media platforms reduce user activities into commercially exploitable bits of information (Van Dijck, 2014).

In the app industry, online dating services thus share two interrelated commercial incentives. Most obviously, they seek to match people up: their goal is to help users find potential romantic or sexual partners in a sea of prospects. But by operating datafication schemes, these apps also break down their users’ intimate and sexual activities into a series of data points that can be collected, counted, and exploited by the companies that own them or by third parties (Albury et al., 2017; Aunspach, 2020). They run these back-end operations to further monetize the data publics they constitute. In many ways, data has always been at the center of professional matchmaking services, but it has become an increasingly vital commodity in the digital economy, as user data can represent, for dating app companies, assets whose value goes way beyond the realm of sexual or romantic coupling. Thus, Grindr—like most dating apps—can nowadays be understood as both a dating app and a data app (Lutz and Ranzini, 2017).

This paper is particularly interested in the propensity of dating apps to constitute new queer “data publics” (Mörtenböck and Mooshammer, 2020). Through the datafication schemes they operate, dating apps—as digital media platforms—increasingly participate in defining the modalities through which social groups are constituted and recognized as such, and in shaping the legitimacy of the sociopolitical claims that can be made in their name or against them. Yet, if corporate actors are constituting new queer data publics, little is known about the commercial and sociopolitical imperatives under which these publics are or can be leveraged. Furthermore, the datafication schemes operated by dating and hookup apps raises important issues in terms of privacy, safety, and self-determination (Burgess et al., 2016), especially for marginalized populations, like the LGBTQ+ communities, who have little control over the regulatory frames that oversee their online activities (DeNardis and Hackl, 2016).

Constructing the CFIUS-Grindr ruling as a public controversy

This paper applies a political economy approach to communication (Wasko, 2004) to critically examine the CFIUS-Grindr ruling and reflect on the implications that sexual datafication raises for the LGBTQ+ communities. This approach generally seeks to understand the sociopolitical implications generated by the financial arrangements and business models deployed by various media industry actors. As argued by Wilken et al. (2019: 3), applying a political economy approach to study dating and hookup apps “directs our attention to the different stakeholders involved with controlling and commercializing applications for web-based and mobile devices, how these are being affected by dynamically changing forces, and what data is generated through them and how it is used and to what ends.” Investigating the business arrangements of digital media platforms and the issues they generate in terms of policy or trade is a notoriously difficult task. Most technologies are specifically built to appear seamless and often seek to actively conceal their corporate back-end operations, like sexual datafication. Corporate data is also often protected by intellectual property laws, which makes it difficult for researchers to access.

To counter this, I turn to controversy analysis, which can be harnessed to bring typically covert activities into public life, as previously shown by science and technology scholars examining Internet regulatory issues (Epstein et al., 2016). Public controversies also play an important part in shaping technologies, as social conflicts bring together various stakeholders that delineate the regulatory frames that govern or should govern digital media platforms and their data infrastructures (Musiani, 2018). My analysis of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling draws from documentation that was mainly collected from February 2019 to June 2020, such as Kunlun’s IPO filings and shareholder reports, which include details about the provisions imposed by CFIUS (9 documents); newspaper and magazine articles on Grindr’s acquisition and the subsequent CFIUS-Grindr controversy (62 articles); background information on CFIUS (15 documents); as well as legal interpretations of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling produced by trade law firms (7 documents), which were among the first to recognize the ruling’s sociopolitical and economic significance. Together, this documentation served to identify key stakeholders in the CFIUS-Grindr ruling, examine how these actors constructed the CFIUS-ruling as a public controversy, and underscore the social process at play in stabilizing norms pertaining to Internet governance and to sexual datafication more specifically (Ziewitz and Pentzold, 2014).

An important limitation of this study pertains to the fact that CFIUS does not openly comment on its rulings, nor does it publicly disclose the documentation that supports them.² Consequently, the institutionalized secrecy surrounding CFIUS’s rulings restricts the possibility of critically assessing the security risks that Grindr effectively poses for the US government and for its users. Even so, secrecy surrounding national security issues is not merely restrictive in nature but also productive (De Goede et al., 2019). In this case, secrecy created a vacuum ripe for speculations about the reasons that may have led CFIUS to declare Grindr a threat to national security. Examining these speculations can highlight how various actors have made sense of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling, as well as how they have collectively shaped the controversy by relating it to broader economic, political, and sociocultural considerations (in this case, as addressed below, to the US–China trade conflict). Speculations are also useful to shed a broader light on Grindr’s corporate activities and examine the implications they raise in terms of policy, especially in the context of growing anxieties across global markets over the risks that corporate datafication poses for citizens and democracies (Kitchin, 2014). The following sections critically examine the CFIUS-Grindr controversy, namely, by drawing insights from scholarships on the US–China trade conflict (Kokas, 2018) and the Lavender Scare (Johnson, 2004).

Data (Mal)Practice at Grindr

With over 27 million users, Grindr is often cited as the most popular queer hookup app in Western countries among men who have sex with men. Founded by Israeli-American entrepreneur Joel Simkhai in 2009, Grindr largely operated independently in its first decade. The app became profitable by offering premium subscriptions and by building queer data publics used to promote products or services. From 2016 to 2018, the company was gradually acquired by the Chinese conglomerate Kunlun Tech, which specialized in gaming and online advertising (Wilken et al., 2019). After Simkhai’s departure, Kunlun Tech quickly took over Grindr’s operations (Ge, 2017). In January 2018, Kunlun’s Chairman and CEO, Zhou Yahui, became Grindr’s interim CEO, while Scott Chen, who had previously worked at Facebook and Instagram, eventually took on the role of President.

Hoping to have the company quickly go public, Grindr’s new managing team, which had little knowledge of queer online dating services, introduced controversial changes to streamline the app’s activities and make it appear more attractive to potential investors (Tse, 2018). According to the testimonies of several former Grindr employees, Kunlun’s new team showed little interest in pursuing the app’s community-based initiatives, like its anti-discrimination campaign Kindr (Mac, 2019). The company terminated its digital lifestyle magazine, INTO, 15 months after its launch to narrow its focus on the app’s matchmaking services (Martin, 2019). These decisions were accompanied by an overall disinterest in user safety, according to the app’s former head of security, who claimed that Kunlun Tech was more focused on fixing technical glitches than implementing long-term encryption protocols ensuring user anonymity and privacy (Blum, 2019).

The new managing team was particularly criticized for its decision to move the app’s computer engineering operations from Los Angeles to Beijing after the first acquisition phase in 2016, before relocating them entirely in early 2018 (Wang and O’ Donnell, 2019). Initially, the team of Chinese engineers tasked with improving the app’s information systems did not have access to user data. This seemingly changed after the departure of Simkhai when those workers are believed to have had free and complete access to critical data infrastructures for several months with little oversight. As a result of this relocation, most US-based computer engineers (around 30) were either let go or resigned, and a second wave of employees from the sales and marketing teams were let go in March 2018 (Mac, 2019).

These organizational changes did not go unnoticed. On March 27, 2019, Reuters reported that CFIUS had identified Grindr as a “national security risk” and was forcing Kunlun Tech to fully divest from the app (O’Donnell et al., 2019). Citing Grindr’s 2018 HIV filter controversy,³ the article claimed that the issue of personal data had “emerged as a mainstream concern of CFIUS” and most likely motivated the committee’s decision, according to sources close to the matter. The relocation of Grindr’s computer engineering offices to China appears to have largely contributed to the launch of an extensive investigation led by CFIUS into the company’s data management practices to evaluate their potential risks for national security. The belief that the Chinese government could have accessed the private information of several million US citizens through Kunlun Tech sparked fear among US officials and Grindr employees alike. “Why did this Chinese company purchase Grindr […]?”, asked a former Grindr executive in a 2019 interview to LA Magazine. “Did they really expect to make money, or are they in this for the data?” (Blum, 2019). These questions would seemingly guide the CFIUS investigation.

For several pundits, the fact that CFIUS would investigate a queer hookup app and label it a national security risk was confounding. Grindr did not exactly seem like the type of technology a serious federal committee would investigate. For others, the CFIUS-Grindr ruling could easily be explained amid the ongoing US–China trade conflict. The ruling came just a few months after the Trump administration announced substantial tariff impositions on Chinese exports and probed serious fraud allegations against Huawei Technologies Co. (Kim, 2019; Mildner and Schmucker, 2019; Yu and Zhang, 2019). It also came in the wake of new trade security regulations, like the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), that shifted its focus toward the investments made by Chinese corporations in the technological assets that collect and exploit the sensitive data of key US citizens, like military and government personnel (FIRRMA, 2018). As such, the CFIUS-Grindr ruling was mainly understood through a dominant geopolitical narrative that depicted Grindr as the latest casualty of the US–China trade conflict, that is, as further proof of US attempts to slow China’s socioeconomic growth in key technological sectors. The belief that the Chinese government could have accessed Grindr user data to blackmail US citizens into revealing state secrets is at the center of this narrative, which is in line with previous accusations of industrial espionage, hacking, and intellectual property theft the United States has made against China over the past decade (Medeiros, 2019).

Unpacking the 2019 CFIUS-Grindr ruling

Founded in 1975,⁴ CFIUS is tasked with investigating the potential threats that certain commercial transactions may pose for US national security. The committee was originally launched to examine large foreign investments made in the country or substantive acquisitions of US assets made by foreign corporations. Under the Trump administration, this interagency committee was led by Steven Mnuchin, former Secretary of the Treasury. Notorious CFIUS members have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and former US Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, both of whom were involved in the investigation against the tech giant Huawei that amounted to 23 criminal charges for theft of trade secrets, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud (Swaine and McCurry, 2019).

While its focus is on commercial transactions, CFIUS is primarily tasked with reviewing business deals that could undermine the country’s economic stability and technological superiority. The committee can impose companies with mitigation strategies that vary in nature and scale to lower the security risks that a deal might pose. Companies may either implement the proposed mitigation strategies or terminate the transaction altogether. If a company refuses to comply with the mitigation strategies or if CFIUS assesses that no satisfactory measures can be implemented to lower security risks, the committee can file a recommendation with the President to block a deal before it closes. Though rare, the committee can also recommend that the President dissolve an already finalized transaction, as illustrated by the CFIUS-Grindr ruling.

Historically, CFIUS has mainly overseen transactions pertaining to energy production and military technologies, but its scope and mandate evolved under the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) in 2018. FIRRMA shifted CFIUS’s focus to include the national security threats posed by the corporations that collect or manage the sensitive personal data of US citizens. This new act stipulates that a business transaction falls under CFIUS’s purview if it pertains to a technology or service dealing with the sensitive personal data of US citizens and/or if it allows a foreign entity to gain access to these data infrastructures or grants them the authority to make decisions that pertain to them (FIRRMA, 2018). As such, FIRRMA provides new definitions over what constitutes sensitive personal data in the context of national security by targeting the data infrastructures managed by companies, both domestic and foreign, that exploit the financial, geolocative, health, and/or genetic information of US citizens, among other types of data. In this context, data sensitivity closely relates to the concern that certain information could be used “to analyze or determine financial distress or hardship” in key US citizens (Polk, 2019). A “sensitive” dataset automatically falls under CFIUS jurisdiction if the corporation that owns it: offers products or services to sensitive populations, which include US military personnel and employees of federal agencies (and their contractors) involved in national security or intelligence work; collects or manages the sensitive data on at least one million US-based users; and/or is planning to collect the sensitive data of one million US-based users or more as part of their primary services or products (Dunn, 2019).

If the initial acquisition of Grindr by Kunlun Tech went under CFIUS’s radar in 2016 when sensitive data infrastructures was less of a targeted issue, the final acquisition phase seemed to have caught the committee’s attention in 2018. Under FIRRMA, Kunlun’s acquisition of Grindr now fell under CFIUS’s jurisdiction, given that the app, like many other tech companies, collects the geolocated and sensitive data of—at the very least—several thousand US citizens (military and federal employees included). Consequently, an investigation started sometime in early 2018 and lasted for several months. The newly FIRRMA-empowered CFIUS could now request extensive information pertaining to Grindr’s and Kunlun’s employees, business plans, daily operations, data storage practices, and personnel appointments (CFIUS, 2019).

On April 1, 2019, a few days after Reuters’ breaking article was published, Kunlun Tech first informed its shareholders it had been the target of a CFIUS investigation (Beijing Kunlun Wanwei Technology Co, Ltd, 2019a). The following month, the corporation stated they had signed a national security agreement as a result of the investigation (Beijing Kunlun Wanwei Technology Co, Ltd, 2019b). This agreement required Kunlun Tech to divest entirely from Grindr and sell the app to a trustee company by June 30, 2020. It also imposed risk mitigation strategies targeting two issues: data access restrictions and governance. First, Grindr agreed to limit employee access to sensitive data infrastructures. The company was also expressly forbidden from sharing sensitive data to any person or entity associated with China. Second, Grindr agreed to maintain its headquarters in the US, cease all business operations in China, and abstain from appointing new personnel related to Kunlun Tech and its associates. Grindr’s Board of Directors was also targeted by this national security agreement. The committee required the company to include on their board three CFIUS-approved members: one member appointed by Kunlun; one US citizen with experience in the app industry who would act as an independent director; and one US citizen with security clearance who would act as security director. Were Kunlun Tech unable to sell Grindr by the June 2020 deadline, the conglomerate would have to transfer all of its rights to an appointed trustee.

By limiting Grindr’s activities in China, the national security agreement seriously impacted Grindr’s business operations as well as Kunlun’s commercial ambitions. Now that the app was under investigation, having it go public could be risky as public interest in the company would be hesitant. Alternately, an auction was not an ideal outcome either. While Kunlun Tech had reportedly been trying to sell the app for twice the price it initially paid (Nam, 2019), any potential buyer would reasonably wait at the last minute before making an offer, knowing that CFIUS had driven Kunlun Tech to the wall. According to former employees, other matchmaking companies (like Match Group and Badoo) showed interest in the app but backed out of negotiations because of Grindr’s chaotic governance practices (Mac, 2019). While Grindr’s new managing team undertook several initiatives to appease CFIUS members—like migrating their computer engineering operations to Taiwan (DeAeth, 2018)—the relocation of Grindr’s data servers to Beijing in 2018 appeared to have been a major issue for the committee, which ultimately took unprecedented measures to coerce Kunlun Tech into divesting from the app it bought a year prior.

In the end, Grindr was sold to the newly formed San Vincente Acquisition Partners conglomerate in the Spring of 2020, with Jeff Bonforte and Rick Marini, both emerging from the California tech industry, respectively, acting as the app’s new CEO and COO (Reynolds, 2020). While this transaction appears to have closed (at least temporarily) a tumultuous chapter of Grindr’s ownership saga, it provided little insight to help its users understand why the Trump administration would identify the app as a national security threat in the first place.

Grindr? It’s a “Blackmailer’s goldmine”!

In the press, the CFIUS-Grindr ruling was rapidly construed by journalists and pundits as the result of broader power struggles between the US and China, two countries that are actively engaging in forms of “digital nationalism” (Gray, 2021). The national security agreement signed by Kunlun Tech implied that the committee had identified Grindr as a “dual-use technology,” that is, a technology developed for civilians but that also possesses potential military or intelligence applications (Bauerle Danzman and Gertz, 2019; Foot and King, 2019). In this case, Grindr was seemingly identified as a dual-use technology because of its back-end operations that automate the datafication and geolocation of queer people’s sexual lives and identities.

Reporters stated that the Trump administration feared Chinese agencies could use Grindr in “honey pot” schemes to identify, track, and eventually recruit US citizens (especially those in strategic positions) into revealing state secrets. As stated in the New York Times, “officials familiar with the case […] say the concern focused on the potential for the blackmail of American officials or contractors, if China threatened to disclose their sexual orientation, or track their movements or dating habits” (Sanger, 2019). Blackmail quickly became the main trope through which the CFIUS ruling was interpreted in the press.⁵ Concerns were expressed at the fact that Grindr could track “email addresses, passwords, billing information, geolocations, and device IDs and IP addresses, as well as messages exchanged with other users and photographs” (Min, 2019). According to Wired contributor Klint Finley (2019), these back-end operations could turn Grindr into a potential “blackmailer’s goldmine.”

The belief that Grindr could be used to blackmail key US citizens illustrates a certain type of anti-Chinese sentiment in line with the ongoing US–China trade conflict, in which China’s recent technological advancements and acquisitions are perceived as direct threats to US national interests (Gurtov and Selden, 2019). “What we need to remember when we think of Grindr is that China is far more advanced in facial recognition software and big data,” claimed Isaac Stone Fish, Senior Fellow at Asia Society (Chang, 2019). “You don’t have to be that creative to think about what a potentially hostile foreign power could do with facial recognition and Grindr.” As such, the belief that Grindr’s users could be “turned” in ways that could threaten US national security only makes sense in the presence of a nefarious geopolitical adversary (in this case: China).

The concern that the Chinese government may have accessed Grindr user data in 2018 is not entirely unfounded. In 2017, China passed its new Cybersecurity Act that provides a series of provisions to safeguard the country’s digital infrastructures and, incidentally, facilitate access to proprietary data infrastructures (Wagner, 2017). The act requires corporations to “adopt measures such as data classification, backup of important data, and encryption” and to systematically log their network activities for a period of at least 6 months (Creemers et al., 2018). It requires that personal data collected by China-based corporations should be kept in China, and that all data backups that relate to Chinese citizens be stored in locally based servers (Creemers et al., 2018). The law also provides Chinese authorities with the power to access data backups for occasional security checks and operational tests. Alongside these policies, China’s 2014 Counter-Espionage Law (Hoffman and Kania, 2018; Qing, 2014) and 2017 National Intelligence Law (Blanchard and Shepherd, 2017; Morrison and Foerster, 2019) require all China-based corporations or organizations to provide authorities with any required data or information in support of intelligence or police operations.

Together, these policies entail that Grindr, as a Chinese-owned asset, could technically have been forced to provide its user datasets to China’s intelligence or police agencies. To that end, Grindr’s managing team has always publicly denied collaborating with Chinese authorities. “Beijing Kunlun is not owned by the Chinese government. This sale doesn’t change how Grindr safeguards our user data”, Grindr’s team stated in a Tumblr post during that time (Grindr, 2018). Yet, because of these policies’ broad scope and ill-defined purview, it may have proven difficult for CFIUS to take Kunlun Tech at their word, especially given that they would forbid its executives from discussing any involvement in Chinese intelligence operations with US officials. That is not to say that Kunlun Tech has effectively used Grindr assets to engage in intelligence work in the past, but it does mean that the conglomerate would be sworn to secrecy if it had. The issue, then, is not about assessing whether Grindr executives have effectively collaborated with Chinese authorities as much as it pertains to the impossibility for them to share this information even if they had. While it is impossible to assess with certainty whether the Chinese government did access Grindr’s data infrastructures in 2018 or 2019, the fact that it could was apparently deemed sufficient by the Trump administration to label the app as a threat to national security.

The CFIUS-Grindr ruling: A Lavender Scare 2.0?

While its relation to the US–China trade conflict is clear, the blackmail trope through which the CFIUS-Grindr ruling was constructed is also undeniably queer specific, as it reproduces a prejudicial assumption about queer people’s allegiance and moral character that does not inherently relate to current socioeconomic affairs. For Grindr to represent a threat to national security, queer people also needed to be construed as liabilities in a way that requires state intervention. In the press, the CIFUS-Grindr ruling exacerbated discourses depicting LGBTQ+ people as being potentially disaffected or disenfranchised. “Access to information collected and retained by Grindr could be a goldmine for foreign intelligence agencies searching for compromising information on them,” stated a Bloomberg article (Kim, 2019). “Moreover, the very purpose of dating apps makes them ideal for establishing contact with persons to compromise them—“honey trap” by app—or to discover whether they are disaffected and vulnerable. A dating app may become where foreign intelligence finds the next Edward Snowden-like leaker of US classified information” (emphasis added, Kim, 2019). These excerpts illustrate how the blackmail trope draws on as much as it reproduces the ongoing assumption that queer people share a weaker allegiance to their country because of their common sexual or gender identities that somehow take precedence. This trope actively depicts queer people as suspicious subjects to distrust in the face of an eminent communist menace which calls for urgent state intervention. It strategically does so by shaping a moral panic superfecta at the intersection of technophobia, LGBTQ-phobia, Sinophobia, and sex negativity.

The LGBTQ+ communities have often been depicted as being naturally inclined to protect their own members before their nation’s interests, that is, by being seen as queer first and loyal citizens second (Kinsman, 2000), a sentiment that may very well have been exacerbated in recent times, though unfoundedly, by the Chelsea Manning affair (Maxwell, 2019). The blackmail trope entails that queer people make for better intelligence targets because of the alleged internal conflict they experience in their loyalties (Johnson, 2004). This trope promotes the belief that queer people are somehow more vulnerable, weak, or careless than their cisheterosexual counterparts. They are also believed to be more likely to engage in potentially embarrassing sexual or intimate practices. These concerns have been persistently directed at Grindr ever since Kunlun Tech completed the app’s acquisition. As stated in a 2018 Washington Post article: “the recent buyout could mean the Chinese government would be able to demand sensitive and embarrassing details on the lives of millions of non-Chinese citizens” (Rogin, 2018). This assumes that queer people engage in shameful or clandestine activities that are best kept in the shadows, and often infer from this that queer people inherently possess a deceitful or untrustworthy character.

It is certainly not the first time in US history that LGBTQ+ citizens have been labeled as potential threats to national security and weaponized amid a socioeconomic conflict to legitimize state intervention in the face of a growing communist menace. This is best illustrated by the Lavender Scare, a historical period referring to a series of state-led investigations into the presence of LGBTQ+ employees in the federal workforce of several Western countries and their resulting policies that led to the systemic oppression of thousands of employees starting in the late 1940s (Johnson, 2004). Much of the Lavender Scare relied on the unsubstantiated fear that communist spies would blackmail LGBTQ+ federal employees into revealing state secrets. The Lavender Scare operated a circular logic in which the blackmail trope played a constitutive part. Officials believed that queer employees were more likely to be compromised by Soviet agents because of their hidden identity and practices. As argued by Charles (2012: 103–104): “gays and Communists exhibited similar traits in the popular American mind: […] both kept their true identities hidden, both seemed to move around in a secretive underworld, both had a common sense of loyalty, both had their own publications and places to meet, both recruited members to their ranks, and people believed both were mentally abnormal”. In that sense, communism and queerness were seen as a single threat against the “American way of life.” Yet, instead of removing potential blackmail sources by reducing the social stigma associated with queerness, the government mandated police institutions, like the FBI, to conduct a series of witch-hunts against LGBTQ+ people, a decision that had the paradoxical result of making them even more susceptible to surveillance and blackmail.

In its effort to purge itself of its queer employees in the name of national security, the US government became the main instigator of blackmail against its own workforce, thus operating a form of self-fulfilling prophecy (Kinsman, 1995). If queer people were the targets of blackmail, it was because of domestic agencies—not foreign ones—who terrorized them or pressured them into resigning to avoid public embarrassment upon learning their “secret.” Eventually, police officers became more proactive in their witch-hunts, often baiting and entrapping queer men into public sex in known cruising areas (most famously, in Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Park, which directly faces the White House). The fact that cruising and public sex were (and remain) illegal activities opened queer men to further police scrutiny and surveillance (Flowers et al., 2000). Authorities also indexed LGBTQ+ networks by infiltrating known bars and private home parties with the help of informant testimonies and undercover agents (Johnson, 2013). By doing so, Western governments curated blacklists and confidential indexes containing the datafied identities of thousands of alleged LGBTQ+ individuals to ensure they could not re-enter the federal workforce once fired under suspicion of sexual perversion (Kinsman, 2004; Robinson and Kimmel, 1994).

Using the Lavender Scare as a historical case study is helpful to highlight how the surveillance and datafication of queer people’s sexual lives and identities have always been political in nature and remain politicized today, especially in matters of national security (Kafer and Grinberg, 2019). The blackmail trope has played a persisting and constitutive role in shaping the Lavender Scare and the CFIUS-Grindr ruling as public controversies, even if both cases occur almost 70 years apart. This trope construes queer people as liabilities that can be weaponized to extend the state’s security apparatus amid heightened panic in the face of a growing communist threat (alternately, Russia or China). It reappears in hegemonic conflicts where the socioeconomic growth and increasing political influence of a foreign adversary are identified as affronts to US supremacy (Shibusawa, 2012).

The ongoing politicization of queer sexual datafication

The preoccupations raised by the Lavender Scare resonate in the digital economy, where the sexual datafication schemes operated by digital media platforms generate crucial concerns for the LGBTQ+ communities in matters of social justice and data privacy (Schram, 2019). Today, a significant percentage of queer people’s intimate and sexual interactions have moved to apps like Grindr (Anderson et al., 2020). These apps were developed so that queer people could meet more safely by interacting privately and coordinating meetups online. Dating and hookup apps are now some of the most prevalent corporate actors that engage in queer surveillance and sexual datafication. Evidently, the surveillance operated by Western governments during the Lavender Scare and by hookup apps like Grindr today differ in their methods and objectives. Still, sexual and intimate socializing remains the primary entry point through which queer surveillance is operated and queer data publics are constituted. What the CFIUS-Grindr ruling highlights is that digital media platforms are exacerbating debates as to determine who can benefit, both financially and politically, from the datafication of queer people’s sexual lives and identities, especially under a newly FIRRMA-empowered CFIUS that has shifted its focus toward sensitive user data.

At first glance, the CFIUS-Grindr ruling could be interpreted as a necessary precaution taken by the US government to protect social media users against the misappropriation of their personal data by foreign states or corporations. The ramifications of China’s new cybersecurity and intelligence laws remain unclear but may very well generate significant issues in terms of data privacy for an increasing number of users around the world who register to digital media platforms that are owned by, or operated on behalf of, China-based corporations (Kokas, 2018). One could infer from these concerns that the risk mitigation strategies imposed on Kunlun Tech by CFIUS demonstrate how the Trump administration took adequate measures in favor of queer data rights protection against a potentially nefarious foreign state.

To this end, the CFIUS-Grindr ruling was generally well received among US representatives, even the more progressive ones. Grindr was already under the scrutiny of Democrat officials in 2018 when claims of mismanagement surfaced regarding the app’s commercial exploitation of HIV-related user data. At the time, senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Kunlun’s CEO urging him to ensure that the privacy of LGBTQ+ US citizens was being protected: “We’ve previously raised concerns about Grindr’s privacy practices because this application serves uniquely vulnerable groups and collects highly sensitive information, including HIV status and sexual orientation” (Fitzsimons, 2019). They added: “In the wrong hands, this information can be misused in ways that threaten the safety and well-being of LGBTQ users around the world. These concerns are heightened when there is a risk of adversarial foreign actors being privy to the data in question”. A year later, Markey and Blumenthal celebrated the CFIUS-Grindr ruling: “CFIUS made the right decision in unwinding Grindr’s acquisition. It should continue to draw a line in the sand for future foreign acquisition of sensitive personal data” (O’Donnell et al., 2019).

Unfortunately, the characterization of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling as a step toward queer data rights protection in the digital economy reveals a misconception of CFIUS’s mandate, which is not to protect individual data rights but to ensure the technological and economic dominance of the United States in global markets. If the ruling is indicative of anything, it is of an ongoing rhetorical strategy used to label the LGBTQ+ communities as liabilities to be weaponized amid socioeconomic conflicts. Moreover, if the Trump administration took a stand against Grindr’s foreign acquisition, it was most likely done against China rather than in the name of queer data rights protection. For those reasons, the LGBTQ+ communities and their allies should remain cautious before celebrating the CFIUS-Grindr ruling as a positive step toward social justice. As shown by the Lavender Scare, the ruling conceals a persistent prejudicial trope depicting queer people as potential risks against which the United States should protect itself, while failing to fully recognize the urgency for the state to protect queer people against the threats posed by the foreign and domestic tech corporations that automate the datafication of their sexual lives and identities.

Toward queer data rights protections in the digital economy

This paper has unpacked the CFIUS-Grindr ruling to highlight some of the implications that sexual datafication raises for the LGBTQ+ communities. By using the Lavender Scare as a historical case study, it analyzes how various stakeholders have constructed the ruling as a public controversy through the use of a persistent and prejudicial blackmail trope depicting queer people as national security liabilities. As such, this paper underlines how the Trump administration has essentially weaponized Grindr’s queer data publics to strategically position itself amid its ongoing trade conflict against China. This points to the importance of vigilantly examining how US officials deploy CFIUS in the future, as well as the rhetoric they use to justify the decisions made under its purview, especially in relation to FIRRMA’S new provisions on sensitive user data.

To this end, in August 2020, CFIUS ordered ByteDance, a Chinese-owned corporation, to divest from the app TikTok in a decision (later retracted) reminiscent of the CFIUS-Grindr ruling (Gray, 2021). Former White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, publicly stated that apps like TikTok “collect significant amounts of private data on users” and that the Trump administration was “committed to protecting the American people from all cyber threats” (Associated Press, 2020). To do so, the committee imposed a list of mitigation strategies that coerced ByteDance into destroying any copies of the data collected from US-based users via TikTok. These statements suggest that the Trump administration primarily construed the CFIUS-TikTok ruling as a matter of privacy rights protection in a globalized digital economy.

This stance drastically departs from the prejudicial blackmail trope shared in the press amid the 2019 CFIUS-Grindr ruling. If both rulings displayed similar anti-Chinese sentiment, the CFIUS-TikTok ruling was unreservedly portrayed by the Trump administration as a privacy and human rights issue while the Grindr ruling was not. And while CFIUS seemingly questioned the allegiance of Grindr’s queer users to justify its investigation into the company’s data practices, the allegiance of TikTok’s users was never challenged in the same way. Comparing both rulings quickly underscores the unequal treatment that LGBTQ+ citizens still face today in matters of data protection rights and national security. If the Trump administration pledged to protect the rights of mainstream social media users, it also evoked the importance of protecting the United States against its own LGBTQ+ citizens and the liabilities they allegedly represent, effectively demonstrating how US citizens receive unequal protections under the umbrella of national security.

To be clear, digital media platforms that cater to LGBTQ+ publics, and the data infrastructures they operate, do deserve extensive scrutiny from policymakers and researchers alike. For example, hookup apps, like Grindr, have been used to monitor and oppress queer people around the world, particularly in oppressive regimes that remain hostile toward LGBTQ+ people (Culzac, 2014). Social media platforms, like Twitter, have become the sites of ongoing homophobic and transphobic harassment campaigns (Ennis, 2016), while entire queer online communities have been suppressed in the name of morality and family friendliness (see the Tumblr NSFW ban controversy, Pilipets and Paasonen, 2020; Sybert, 2021). Social media profiles, in combination with facial recognition software, have been used by misguided researchers to predict sexual orientation (Lewis, 2018), while new algorithmic software that automates content moderation on platforms like YouTube has been accused of reproducing discriminatory biases that disproportionally target queer creators by demonetizing the content they create (Southerton et al., 2020). As such, this paper contributes to an emerging scholarship examining the cultural, sociopolitical, and commercial implications that digital media platforms raise for the LGBTQ+ communities, especially through the datafication and algorithmic systems they operate.

In light of this, policymakers should ensure that digital media platforms are effectively protecting the rights and safety of their LGBTQ+ users. However, queer data publics should not be weaponized to justify and extend forceful socioeconomic policies in long-lasting trade conflicts. This requires shifting adversarial viewpoints in matters of national security that have traditionally construed queer vulnerabilities as individual character flaws rather than as a fundamental human rights issue. It also requires reframing queer data rights protection in the digital age as an end and not as a political means. Today, the ethical and legal issues that digital media platforms generate for the LGBTQ+ communities abound. These issues should not be used as an indicator of how queer people are failing their governments but of how governments are failing them in protecting their rights to data privacy. Ultimately, the LGBTQ+ communities, among other marginalized communities, should have a say in how their data are exploited by tech companies and be better protected by policies that compel those companies to more transparency and accountability.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Postdoctoral fellowship).

ORCID iD

David Myles

Notes

David Myles is Assistant Professor at the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société, Institut national de la recherche scientifique.

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Grindr? it’s a “Blackmailer’s goldmine”! The weaponization of queer data publics Amid the US–China trade conflict

Abstract

Keywords

Sexual datafication and the constitution of queer data publics

Constructing the CFIUS-Grindr ruling as a public controversy

Data (Mal)Practice at Grindr

Unpacking the 2019 CFIUS-Grindr ruling

Grindr? It’s a “Blackmailer’s goldmine”!

The CFIUS-Grindr ruling: A Lavender Scare 2.0?

The ongoing politicization of queer sexual datafication

Toward queer data rights protections in the digital economy

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References