Colorado Catholic Group Spent Millions On Sensitive Grindr Data To Shame Priests

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the greed-did-this dept

It’s time once again to play: “things that probably wouldn’t happen if the U.S. wasn’t too corrupt to pass a decent internet-era privacy law.”

Last week, The Washington Post revealed that a group of conservative Colorado Catholics spent millions of dollars to purchase user location data to single out priests that had used gay dating and hookup apps — then shared it with bishops around the country.

Leaders of the group, dubbed the Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, didn’t much want to discuss the secretive project with the Post. But the paper did manage to talk to several insiders familiar with the effort who (quite correctly) highlight the unethical nature of the campaign:

Both disapprove of the project because they see it as spying and coercive in ways that are damaging to priest-bishop relations and to the reputation of the Catholic Church and thus its ability to evangelize. They also see the project as taking a simplistic approach to morality that they call un-Catholic.

Some of the folks behind this effort are, unsurprisingly, the same ones that forced a priest to resign in 2021 after obtaining his “anonymized” (read: not at all anonymous) Grindr data and outing him to the public. It’s not hard to see how similar tactics could be used by activists and vigilantes to harass (or worse) those seeking abortion care in the post-Roe era. Or, how our lax regulatory environment could increasingly be abused by crackpots more generally.

For the better part of a generation, activists and privacy advocates warned what would happen if we didn’t build meaningful guard rails for the collection and monetization of U.S. consumer data. Policymakers repeatedly ignored them, making it aggressively clear that making money was more important than consumer safety or even market health.

Now, we’ve arrived at a point where everyone from stalkers to people pretending to be law enforcement can acquire sensitive consumer location, browsing, or even mental health data and weaponize it against you. That’s before you even get to the repeated failures of major companies and telecoms to meaningfully secure their own networks from active hacker intrusions.

Even post-Roe, when activists made it clear that our failure to adequately regulate data brokers could pose unique new risks to those looking to obtain abortion care for themselves or their loved ones, the U.S. policymaker response has been either a giant yawn, or to try and distract the public from their broader policy failures by myopically hyperventilating about TikTok.

Again, we don’t want to fix the actual problem (our failure to meaningfully regulate data brokers or pass a meaningful internet-era privacy law) because U.S. companies might make less money, and the U.S. government would have to obtain warrants instead of buying data broker data on the cheap.

Filed Under: anonymized, browsing data, data, location data, priests, privacy, privacy law, security