Grindr stops location feature to protect athletes in the Olympic village

Dating app Grindr has taken steps to protect residents at the Athlete’s Village at the Winter Olympics from being identified. They have turned off their location search function for the area.

Tech website Engadget reported on the move, sharing that Gridr for Equality Director, Jack Harrison-Quintana, hoped the move would allow athletes to feel confident to be themselves during their stay at the Olympics.

Anyone who used Grindr in the vicinity of the village gets a pop notification letting them know that people from the rest of the world are unable to zoom-in on the location, assuring their privacy to only those nearby.

The move protects, to a degree, Olympians from countries where homosexuality is illegal or social frowned up from being identified.

In 2016 a heterosexual journalist from website The Daily Beast used several LGBTIQA+ dating apps to discover who was athletes who were online at the Rio de Janiero Olympics . The article was slammed for being unethical and potentially putting athletes at risk.

Australian snowboarder Belle Brockhoff is just one of the many out and proud LGBTIQA+ athletes taking part in the Beijing Winter Olympics.

There are twice as many athletes who have publicly shared that they are part of the LGBTIQA+ communities than at the previous games in 2018. Reports suggest there are 35 queer athletes taking part in the games this time round.

Canada has 10 openly LGBTIQA+ athletes in their team including ice hockey players Jamie Lee Rattray, Emily Clark, Mélodie Daoust and Jill Saulnier. While the USA has six LGBTIQA+ team members and Great Britain has four.

Skier Gus Kenworthy has previously competed for the USA, but this time round he’s part of team Great Britain. Kenworthy was born in England but grew up in the USA, his mother is English.

In the figure skating you’ll find Armenia’s Simon Proulx Sénécal, Canada’s Eric Radford and Paul Poirier, France’s Guillaume Cizeron and Kevin Aymoz, Great Britain’s Lewis Gibson, Italy’s Filippo Ambrosini, and the USA has Timothy LeDuc and Jason Brown, while Amber Glenn is a reserve.

Australia’s Belle Brockoff took part in the snowboarding, as did Sarka Pancochova from the Czech Republic.

Ice Hockey is the sport where there is a lot of LGBTIQA+ representation, but there are also queer athletes taking part in Ski Jumping, Skeleton, the Biathlon, Curling and Skiing.

OIP Staff

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