How the Grindr app caused a Church spawn to fall

Another matter of personal data that has fallen into the wrong hands. While the planet vibrates to the rhythms of the revelations on state surveillance in the Pegasus scandal, the Catholic world in the United States has just witnessed the fall of one of the most important dignitaries of the Church … due to indiscretions of a dating application.

Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill resigned Monday, July 19, from the very important post of secretary general of the Conference of Bishops of the United States, shortly before the publication of an article in which he is named as very active homosexual.

“Revelations” with homophobic overtones

“We learned on Monday that an article was going to appear reporting potentially inappropriate behavior by Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill. What was reported to us did not relate to acts of improper conduct with minors, but to avoid any distraction from the work in progress at the Bishops’ Conference, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill has resigned ”, said José Horacio Gomez, the president of the United States Conference of Bishops.

The “bomb” was dropped the next day, Tuesday, by the Catholic blog The Pillar. Jeffrey Burrill is accused of having used Grindr, the famous gay dating app on a daily basis, and of having often visited places frequented by the homosexual community all over the United States. “The information in our possession proves that he engaged in serial illicit misconduct between 2018 and 2020,” write the authors of the article.

The Pillar relies on data from the Grindr app provided by a “data reseller and authenticated by an independent analytics company”. Based on this information, the blog team deduced that Jeffrey Burrill’s phone had connected to the app in places believed to be inconsistent with his vow of celibacy.

This “investigation” and the resignation keep causing waves… and not only within the North American Catholic community, which is wondering about the moral implications of these “revelations” with homophobic overtones.

Shortly before the publication of The Pillar, the conservative news site Catholic News Agency (CNA), visibly informed of the scandal to come, published an article on an “individual” who claimed to Catholic institutions and media, since 2018, to have access “to technologies allowing the identification of members of the clergy using dating applications like Tinder and Grindr ”. He offered to provide them with a list of these “fishermen”.

“CNA and others declined this offer” in the name of privacy, the article said. The Pillar seems to have been more sensitive to the speeches of this person who assured to act “to ‘reform’ the American clergy”, underlines CNA.

The article in The Pillar “is an amoral investigation riddled with homophobic innuendo that will do great harm to the American Catholic community,” protested Steven P. Millies, one of the leaders of the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago, in a column published by the Washington Post, Wednesday July 21.

He denounces The Pillar’s argument which justifies his decision to expose Jeffrey Burrill’s private life in this way by the fact that his sexual preferences would be incompatible with a part of his work, which consists in responding to the scandal of sexual abuse within the American Catholic Church. “Making a connection between sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex and cases of sexual abuse can hardly be seen as anything other than homophobia,” notes Steven Millies.

Not so anonymous data

He is also concerned about the use of Grindr data to “outer” the clergyman. To them, this means that “no one is safe and that anything is allowed” to find the so-called fishermen.

This situation also puts many observers in an embarrassment, and this well beyond the Catholic community. The misadventures of Jeffrey Burrill are symptomatic “of a failure of our societies which has made possible a situation in which data on our every movement exists and circulates between the hands of the actors of the vast, very unregulated sector of data collection”, writes the New York Times in an editorial.

In theory, the information collected by Grindr is “anonymized” before being sold to around twenty advertising agencies. In other words, these data merchants are not supposed to know who the individuals are behind all the statistics on the age of Grindr users, their favorite hangouts, or even their hobbies.

But that promise is for apps like Grindr and advertisers. “Unfortunately, these data brokers and advertisers lied to the public by assuring them that this information collected was 100% anonymous. And this horrible episode [concernant Jeffrey Burrill, NDLR] demonstrate that the experts were right to warn us that it is still possible to identify the individuals behind the data, ”said Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, iAsked by the Vox site.

In the case of Jeffrey Burrill, The Pillar explains having first discovered, in the data provided to it, the unique identifier of a phone often geolocated at the home and at the place of work of the clergyman. The authors of the article deduced that it was his device… and that it was also used to connect “daily” to Grindr from bars and other gay meeting places.

It only took a small, determined group to achieve their ends thanks to supposed “anonymous” data. “The concern is that now that they have demonstrated that it is feasible, others will do the same for other reasons,” notes Nat Meysenburg, a researcher at the Open Technology Institute of the American Progressive Think Tank. New America, interviewed by the Slate site.

And the damage can be considerable. In Jeffrey Burrill’s case, this was just information from the Grindr app alone. But “there is an industry that weighs in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which you have never heard of, and which spends its time collecting personal data from all corners of the Internet for resale, ensuring that they are completely anonymous, ”recalls Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of new technology law at Northeastern University in Boston, interviewed by Slate. And we now know that this is far from true.