Grindr will pay £26 million after UK users said advertisers saw their HIV status

Grindr will pay £26 million, about €30 million, to settle a UK group action brought by 12,000 users who said the dating app shared highly sensitive personal data, including HIV status in some cases, with advertising companies. London firm Austen Hays filed the claim in the High Court in April 2024. If the pot is divided evenly, each claimant receives about £2,167.

The company, now listed in New York as GRND, described the case in a U.S. regulatory filing as a dispute over “historical data practices before 2020,” when Grindr was owned and controlled by Beijing Kunlun Tech, a Chinese gaming firm. The settlement includes no finding and no admission of liability. Grindr said it “recognises and acknowledges the distress and loss of trust expressed by some of its UK users regarding that pre-2020 period.” It will pay £13 million by the end of 2026 and £13 million by the end of March 2027.

The underlying allegation is specific. Users said advertising software on the service received data that UK privacy law treats as special category information: health status, sexual orientation, and the kind of profile detail that makes a dating app useful and, if leaked, dangerous. HIV status is not a demographic checkbox. In some countries it is a reason for violence, job loss or prosecution. Even in the UK it is information a person discloses to a clinic or a partner, not to a demand-side advertising platform.

Kunlun bought Grindr in stages in the 2010s and sold it after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States forced a divestment on national-security grounds. The new owners have spent years telling investors that the old stack is gone. The UK case tested whether that break in corporate control also broke legal responsibility for data that had already left the app. The settlement means a court will not answer that question. The payment means the claimants did not walk away empty.

Grindr says it has 15 million monthly users in 190 countries and remains “a safe space” committed to transparency and user control. In July, at the International AIDS Conference in Rio, the company’s Grindr for Equality programme promised to connect 10 million people to HIV prevention by 2028, citing a survey that found high awareness of PrEP and low access. Those two public faces now sit on the same week’s record: a health campaign and a cheque for health data that, claimants say, went to ad firms.

Average awards of £2,167 will not change a life. They may change how dating apps write contracts with advertising software. UK and EU rules already treat health data as off-limits for ordinary behavioural ads. The case alleged that the rule was broken in practice through software development kits and tracking pixels that product teams treated as plumbing. That plumbing is still standard across consumer apps. The price of this settlement is a signal to general counsel more than to users.

Two dates now matter inside Grindr. The December 2026 instalment has to leave the company. The March 2027 instalment has to follow. If either slips, the claimants’ lawyers will be back in court on a simpler claim: unpaid settlement. For everyone else the file is a reminder that “historical practices” is a phrase companies use when the people who built the old system are gone and the data those systems copied is not.