Main | Tuesday, September 16, 2014

REPORT: Egyptian Police Are Using Dating Apps To Hunt Down Gay Men

According to a report published by France 24, Egyptian authorities are using smartphone dating apps such as Grindr to hunt down gay men. Such tactics were predicted last month when an anonymous Grindr member contacted thousands of overseas users to warn them that their exact locations could be triangulated. The France 24 report does not mention triangulation.
Homosexuality is not illegal in Egypt. Despite this, numerous people have been arrested while taking part in festivities celebrating gay unions and accused of “debauchery.” In May, for example, four men were arrested during a party organised in Nasr City, located east of Cairo. One of them was sentenced to 12 years of prison, the heaviest sentence ever given to an LGBT person in Egypt. According to accounts given by numerous witnesses, police are using gay online dating sites, such as Grindr, to hunt down LGBT people. Egyptian gay rights activists have published numerous messages warning members of the community to refrain from using these applications. According to several gay rights activists, at least 77 LGBT people have been arrested since October 2013.
RELATED: Earlier this week Scruff announced that a coming version of their app will hide the user's location by default in countries where being gay is illegal or simply dangerous.
When a user elects to hide his distance on SCRUFF, we not only remove the information from his profile data, but we also randomize his location on our servers. This means that, if he lives in the West Village in NYC, he could potentially appear in between two people in SoHo. However, if he uses SCRUFF in the countryside, randomizing his location by a few blocks might still not be enough. That's why we take density into account, so if you live in the city, your location will be randomized by a few blocks, but in the country it could be a few miles or more. This issue is even more critical for people who live in regions that criminalize homosexuality or male/female interaction, such as Russia and the Middle East. Hiding distance may be a smart option for people in these places to enable in all location-based apps that provide this feature. SCRUFF wants to ensure our members both who live in these countries and who travel to these countries stay informed, and in an upcoming release we will be enabling "hide distance" by default for people in these regions.

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