What the Grindr settlement teaches us about where your health data should live

Grindr agreed this week to pay £26 million to settle a UK lawsuit brought by roughly 12,000 users who said the app shared their sensitive personal information, including HIV status, with advertising companies. The case covers conduct from before 2020, and Grindr disputes the allegations without admitting wrongdoing. But the lesson underneath the headline isn’t about one company. It’s about what happens to sensitive data the moment it lives somewhere other than your own device.

The claims, filed at London’s High Court by the law firm Austen Hays, alleged that information including sexual orientation, ethnicity, HIV status, and HIV test dates was passed to third parties for commercial purposes. Grindr will pay the settlement in two installments totaling £26 million by the end of March 2027 and says it has overhauled its privacy program since. It’s also not the first time this exact issue has come up: Norway’s data protection authority fined Grindr roughly £4.8 million in 2021 for sharing similar information without valid consent, and an appeals court upheld that decision in 2025.

The problem isn’t one company. It’s the model.

Any app that stores sensitive health data on a central server has to keep making decisions about that data, forever: how it’s encrypted, which employees can query it, which analytics or advertising vendors get a data feed, what happens in an acquisition, and how the company responds when a subpoena or a breach shows up. None of that requires bad intent. Ownership changes. Privacy teams turn over. A vendor contract gets renewed by someone who never saw the original privacy commitments. The risk isn’t a specific villain. It’s that the data exists somewhere a company controls at all.

Why Protecht doesn’t store your results in the first place

Protecht was built on the opposite premise: we shouldn’t be able to see, hold, or share your test results, because we don’t store them. When you connect a provider through Apple Health/HealthKit, your results are pulled directly and encrypted on your device using AES-256, with the key in your iPhone’s Keychain. There’s no upload button, which means results can’t be edited or falsified. Protecht doesn’t store your results, which means there’s nothing on our end to sell, subpoena, or lose in a breach. When you choose to share a result, the recipient gets a read-only view that automatically expires after 60 seconds, and they don’t even need the app installed to see it.

That design matters most for HIV status specifically, since it’s the single most sensitive line item in the Grindr allegations. It’s also the one thing we’ve made permanently free for every Protecht user. Sharing a negative result or a recent test date shouldn’t come with a paywall attached, and it definitely shouldn’t come with a data-sharing tradeoff you didn’t agree to.

What to actually check, on any app

You don’t have to take our word for any of this, and you shouldn’t take any health app’s word for it either. Look for whether the app can technically see your health data at all, not just whether its privacy policy says it won’t share it. A policy is a promise. On-device, provider-verified, read-only architecture is a receipt.

Sources

• The Guardian: Grindr to settle UK lawsuit over dating app ad data sharing
• PinkNews: Grindr to pay out £26million settlement in lawsuit over sharing HIV status info
• CBC News: Grindr to pay settlement over sale of users’ info, including HIV status