Grindr Disables Location Services At Paris Olympic Village

While the Paris Olympics are now officially underway, a small detail about Grindr services in the Olympic Village has caught the attention of many.

Whilst attempting to use location services in Paris, Grindr uses have noticed a particular blank area on the map.

And Grindr officials have confirmed it’s happening for a very good reason.

Grindr makes changes to protect LGBTQIA+ athletes

Earlier this week eagle eyed Grindr users noted what appeared to be a Grindr “outage” in the Paris Olympic village.

Users took to social media claiming that the app had been blocked in the village when they attempted to use search functions in the area.

This particular feature allows users to search for profiles in a specific area, rather than just those around them.

But searches in the Olympic village were showing up blank.

However it turns out that Grindr officials had actually placed these restrictions on the service themselves.

They confirmed that they had disabled the location based features in the area, preventing users from identifying which profiles were located in that area.

In a recent blog post they revealed that the move was put in place to protect any LGBTQIA+ athletes who could be at risk in their home countries if their sexuality was discovered.

“If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr can put them at risk of being outed by curious individuals who may try to identify and expose them on the app” they said.

Grindr officials took a similar approach at the 2022 winter Olympics in Beijing to protect participants in the games.

Currently there are 67 countries worldwide with current laws that criminalise same sex relations.

Further to this there are 11 countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.

Olympic diver Tom Daley spoke passionately about the issue in 2021 when accepting the sport award at the Attitude Awards. He vowed to campaign to prevent these 11 countries from participating in future Olympics.

“So I want to make it my mission over the next, well, hopefully before the Paris Olympics in 2024, to make it so that the countries [where it’s] punishable by death for LGBT people are not allowed to compete at the Olympic Games” he said at the time.