Location-based hate crimes?

Since marrying my iPhone I’ve become a bit of a mobile evangelist and can’t wait for the day everyone is thusly enabled, so we can all tattoo QR codes to our forheads and freely peruse each other’s Flickr streams when we’re bored in line at Starbucks. We’re not quite there yet as a society.

With the early adopters perhaps getting over the novelty of checkins sans widespread fat rewards from participating brands, and Facebook yet to deploy anything super cool in the location-based sphere, I’ve been waiting for a GPS development that’s useful enough to catch on, thereby spurring mainstream use.

Grindr is on the social news scene today, and it does sound pretty useful*: a mobile gaydar. Local gay men can check each other out, chat, and hook up based on who’s nearby.

The app has thousands of reviews and over half a million members, so obviously it’s doing the trick using local/mobile technology to help people socialize. Identifying people with similar interests & allowing them to get together is the best case scenario for mobile social.

Does broadcasting gay men’s GPS coordinates strike anyone else as a bit scary in terms of personal safety, though?

I’m not even going to type out the methods by which I think the gay-unfriendly could use this app for violent purposes, lest Google serve it up to would-be criminals. Let’s just say letting people know you’re around, available, and, ahem, feeling sociable (regardless of personal orientation) might be an open invitation to weirdos. Nearby weirdos—the worst kind.

This type of app seems particularly sensitive because the goal is IRL meetups. You can block a user who’s acting creepy, but a skillful “predator” would take pains to appear to be someone you’d want to meet.

(I guess I just described the entire internet. Except this branch of it knows where you are).

It also seems like a privacy issue to have the general public be able to identify you as a particular sexual orientation, but I guess that’s the user’s decision when he signs up for the service.

I contacted the guys at Grindr to see if they’d had reports of any trouble of this kind, and what they suggest people do to protect themselves. They haven’t replied yet, no doubt swamped with media attention (deserved, IMO. It’s a good concept for an app). If they respond, I’ll update.

UPDATE: The good folks at Grindr have replied, and they do indeed take safety & privacy seriously:

In the year and a half that we have been available on the iTunes App Store, Grindr has fortunately not encountered any known user safety issues. Grindr currently has over 900,000 users (over 230,000 of them use Grindr daily) in 162 countries, and to our knowledge none have used location information maliciously.

Grindr takes user privacy and safety very seriously. As with any online service, we encourage our users to be smart and use common sense when chatting with new people. We offer two features that let Grindr users manage their location privacy:

1) Hide Distance: A user can hide his distance from others by changing a profile setting. This setting prevents other users from seeing his exact distance information.

2) Block User: A user can block other Grindr users, preventing them from viewing his profile and contacting him.

Users can also view some of our safety tips.

There is an added benefit to location based services – location identification. If someone engages in illegal activity on our network, Grindr cooperates fully with authorities to identify and locate the offending user.

*I lolled at the App Store review “Two months with Grindr and I think I have already slept with 12 different guys!” If those aren’t metrics of platform success, I don’t know what is.