Police told to reinvestigate man's death after suspected blackmail on Grindr Police have been told to reopen their investigation into the death of Scott Gough, who allegedly took his own life after being targeted by a gang of men on the gay dating app Grindr. A police Professional Standards Department (PSD) report found failures in the investigation into the 56-year-old's death, which happened the day after a group of men turned up at his home demanding his car keys. His partner, Cameron Tewson accused the police of marking their own homework after his complaint of homophobia was not upheld. Hertfordshire Police, the investigating force, said it remains committed to ensuring members of the LGBTQ+ community feel supported when approaching the force. The report into the police's actions comes after a BBC investigation found multiple cases of suspected blackmail involving victims targeted on Grindr in Gough's local area, with at least four connected to the same gang, which remains at large.

Grindr Goes'AI-First' as It Strives to Be an'Everything App for the Gay Guy' After controlling shareholders failed to take Grindr private and controversies over data and the banning of the phrase "No Zionists," Grindr's CEO opens up about AI, privacy, and big expansion plans. Every Grindr user is unique. South Koreans prefer open relationships. The highest percentage of self-proclaimed "daddies" call the US home, and Switzerland is overrun with twinks. Delivered by annual trend report Grindr Unwrapped, those critical insights offer the type of information that will help usher the company into its "AI-first" era where it's "the everything app for the gay guy," CEO George Arison tells WIRED. Grindr was the first to leverage geo-location tech when it burst onto the scene in 2009. Arison arrived at the company in 2022 from the world of automotive ecommerce.

Police accused of'homophobic assumptions' over victims of blackmail on Grindr Police failed to properly investigate allegations that a gang was blackmailing men on the gay dating app Grindr, the BBC can reveal. Our investigation has learned of five cases of suspected blackmail involving victims targeted on Grindr in one area, with at least four of them connected to the same gang, which remains at large. In one instance, a suspected victim killed himself 24 hours after a group of men turned up at his home demanding he hand over his new Range Rover. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) watchdog has told Hertfordshire Police - the investigating force - to examine whether homophobic assumptions could have contributed to failures in the investigation. Hertfordshire Police said it was unable to discuss specific points about the case, which has now been reopened, but said it is committed to building and maintaining good working relationships with the LGBTQ+ communities.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A killer targeted men using Grindr, police say. The Grindr logo is seen among other dating apps on a mobile phone screen. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

A Florida couple is behind bars for allegedly using an online dating app to lure a 16-year-old girl to their home, brutally torturing and murdering her before dismembering her remains. The body of Miranda Corsette was discarded in a dumpster days after she was reported missing on Feb. 24, according to the St. Petersburg Police Department. Authorities allege that Steven Gress, 35, used the online dating app Grindr to lure Corsette to his house, located approximately 20 miles southwest of Tampa, on Feb. 14. "After meeting him the first time, [Corsette] went home and then the next day she returned to [Gress'] home," police said. Miranda Corsette smiles in an undated photograph shared by the St. Petersburg Police Department. Corsette was allegedly murdered by a man she had met on a dating app, Steven Gress, and his domestic partner, Michelle Brandes.

Grindr, the dating app that caters to gay men, cannot be held responsible for the rape of a 15-year-old boy who the company matched with sexual predators, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week; it is the latest teens-versus-tech spat in a fight over internet immunity experts say could soon come before the U.S. Supreme Court. The appellate court's ruling upheld a 2023 decision by U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II of the Central District of California, who dismissed the suit, saying Grindr was shielded by broad immunity protections passed almost a decade before the plaintiff was born. In a series of events Wright called "alarming and tragic," a closeted Nova Scotia teen downloaded the LGBTQ hookup app in an attempt to meet other gay kids in his rural Canadian town. Instead, over the course of four days, he was assaulted by four adult men, including a man who picked him up after the teen sent him pictures from his high school cafeteria. LGBTQ social networking platform Grindr last year told its all-remote staff they had to return to the office or lose their jobs.

Grindr's AI wingman, currently in beta testing with around 10,000 users, arrives at a pivotal moment for the software company. With its iconic notification chirp and ominous mask logo, the app is known culturally as a digital bathhouse for gay and bisexual men to swap nudes and meet with nearby users for sex, but Grindr CEO George Arison sees the addition of a generative AI assistant and machine intelligence tools as an opportunity for expansion. "This is not just a hookup product anymore," he says. "There's obviously no question that it started out as a hookup product, but the fact that it's become a lot more over time is something people don't fully appreciate." Grindr's product road map for 2025 spotlights multiple AI features aimed at current power users, like chat summaries, as well as dating and travel-focused tools.

TechCrunch reported that a group of researchers from the university KU Leuven in Belgium identified six popular dating apps that malicious users can use to pinpoint the near-exact location of other users. Dating apps including Hinge, Happn, Bumble, Grindr, Badoo and Hily all exhibited some form of "trilateration" that could expose users' approximate locations, which prompted some of the apps to take action and tighten their security, according to the published paper. The term "trilateration" refers to a three-point measurement used in GPS to determine the relative distance to a target. The six named apps fell into one of three categories of trilateration" including "exact distance trilateration" in which a target is accurate to "at least a 111m by 111m square (at the equator)," "round distance trilateration" or "oracle trilateration" in which distance filters are used to approximate a rounded area much like a Venn diagram. Grindr is "susceptible to exact distance trilateration" while Happn falls under "rounded distance trilateration."

Bumble, the company that distinguished itself from apps like Tinder by creating a "feminist dating app," hasn't done too many favors for that brand recently. Yes, there was the ad campaign that appeared to shame women who choose celibacy--which the company wisely retracted this week. There was also the tentative announcement that Bumble may roll back its defining "women make the first move" ethos. Then there were the strange remarks last week from Bumble founder and #girlboss icon Whitney Wolfe Herd, who informed the audience at Bloomberg's Tech Summit of "a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with another dating concierge." Naturally, these "concierges" would make use of artificial intelligence software, which users could train by "shar[ing] your insecurities" and thus help to "train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself," Wolfe Herd claimed.

Modern dating can be severed into two eras: before the swipe, and after. When Tinder and other dating apps took off in the early 2010s, they unleashed a way to more easily access potential love interests than ever before. By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. Suddenly, saying "We met on Hinge" was as normal as saying "We met in college" or "We met through a friend." The share of couples meeting on apps has remained pretty consistent in the years since his 2017 study, Rosenfeld told me.