Gay Egyptians Worry the Government Has Been Using a Hookup App to Track Them

From the
your-tool-of-liberation-might-be-turned-against-you files, here’s a
development in Egypt, where the regime’s regression to police-state
status has included a crackdown on gay men. Amid the arrests,
activists claim that the government has used Grindr, a gay hookup
app, to locate and incarcerate men seeking sex. (If so, the
pleasure police there are more sophisticated than their
counterparts in Turkey, who simply
banned the app.)

Here’s a Cairo Scene
report from August:

A source close to the gay and lesbian community claims that the
apps are putting the country’s homosexuals in danger.

“It’s a bad system right now,” he said. “There have been a
number of arrests in the last few months linked to these
applications. They are using technology to triangulate the
location.

“It is possible to tell a user’s position within a few hundred
metres, and many users include personal pictures, making them
easily identifiable to cops.”

Evidently the folks at Nearby Buddy Finder—yes, that’s what the
company is called—were listening. Yesterday The New York
Times
reported that Grindr has “disabled the feature that
discloses how far other users in Egypt are.”