You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It's tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it's making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, a government contractor and technologist, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets.
In 2019, Yeagley began making the rounds in Washington, DC. He had a blunt warning for anyone in the country's national security establishment who would listen: The US government had a Grindr problem.
A popular dating and hookup app, Grindr relied on the GPS capabilities of modern smartphones to connect potential partners in the same city, neighborhood, or even building. The app can show how far away a potential partner is in real time, down to the foot.
In its 10 years of operation, Grindr had amassed millions of users and become a central cog in gay culture around the globe. But to Yeagley, Grindr was something else: one of the tens of thousands of carelessly designed mobile phone apps that leaked massive amounts of data into the opaque world of online advertisers.
