Is Grindr blocked in the Olympic Village?

Grindr, the popular gay dating app, is taking measures to safeguard the 2024 Olympic athletes’ privacy who aren’t open about their sexuality by blocking geolocation and search functions near the Paris Olympic Village.

Nearly 15,000 Olympians, including 155 openly gay male athletes, are in the Village.

Posts online revealed that users trying to explore the Village area got a “No profiles available” screen when they set the location as the Village. Reports from Futurism indicate that the app’s “Explore” page is also blocked.

Olympians can still access the app and browse each other’s profiles.

Grindr has over 13 million monthly users.

The move is not new to Grindr. The app took similar steps during the 2008 Summer Olympics and 2022 Winter Olympics to protect closeted (not openly out) gay athletes belonging to countries where homosexuality is a crime.

Several closeted athletes were outed on social media by other Grindr users during the 2016 Rio Games and 2021 Tokyo Games. The app implemented new privacy features like allowing unlimited disappearing messages and disabling screenshots this time to avoid such incidents.

The Paris Games’ Opening Ceremony is on July 26 (tomorrow).