Always be cautious, do your own research, and trust your instincts. If a scenario seems too good to be true or feels suspicious, it probably is. Your safety is more important than seeming rude or potentially missing an opportunity to meet someone. Don’t second guess yourself — if you are in doubt, stop the conversation.
If you are deciding whether to share information or meet with someone, you’ll want to get to know them and establish trust first. This takes time, and everyone has different levels of comfort about what to share, when, and how.
Be suspicious of someone if:
- They pressure you to meet in private quickly, and/or get upset and pushy if you aren’t willing to travel to meet them, or if you are only willing to host at your place.
- They pressure you to share more information than you’re comfortable with, and are asking a lot of intrusive questions.
- They don’t respect your boundaries. People who are pushy or aggressive online may be pushy or aggressive in person.
- They make lofty promises, or appear exceptionally generous.
- If someone sends you a strange link, consider carefully whether to click it. If you do, don’t enter private information or log-in credentials, as this could be a phishing scam. Read our Scam Awareness Guide for more information on red flags to look out for.
- They change the meeting place at the last minute to somewhere you don’t know.
Establishing trust in lower-risk areas
If you are in an area where being LGBTQ is generally accepted, some ways to establish trust are:
- Exchange face photos, rather than just physical descriptions and locations.
- If you have established initial trust, you may want to exchange social media info, and/or ask a friend (or friend-of-a-friend) if they know the person.
- If you are in the US, learn how to search public records and other information to help identify if someone has a history of harm.
- You can also search for them online, via people who may know them or by searching for them using a reverse image search, on Google, or social media.
Be suspicious of someone if:
- They refuse to send you photos of their face (even privately), and/or the photos appear extremely filtered, blurry, or unclear.
- They won’t video chat before meeting.
- They aren’t willing to answer your questions.
- They redirect you to use another app, especially an encrypted messaging platform.
Establishing trust in higher-risk areas
If you are in an area where being LGBTQ is illegal or more dangerous, we recommend limiting the information you share. However, this also means you have less information about the other person.
- Use a high level of caution when chatting with others.
- It is recommended that you don’t share your phone number or general social media info until you have met and verified how safe and trustworthy the person is.
- If you want to continue chatting outside of Grindr, consider using secure messaging apps that use end-to-end encryption.
- Please note on Wire you don’t need to register with your phone number, you can simply register with an email address if you want to. In Signal and Wire (and WhatsApp), you can set a time for the messages to be deleted. After a specified period of time your conversation will automatically disappear. This is highly recommended.
Think critically about where to have conversations.
- Keeping your conversations on Grindr allows our moderation team to review them in the event you reach out for support. We are also able to preserve information and share with law enforcement if you choose to make a report. We offer text chat, voice messaging, and video calls.
- You can delete any message or chat thread with anyone you've been chatting to. Though it is possible to delete messages, doing so only deletes the message from your chat history, not the other person's. More information on this feature is available here.
- Some people (especially those in areas where being LGBTQ is illegal) may feel more comfortable talking on an encrypted messaging app, but know that these channels are also favored by scammers and bad actors who don’t want evidence of their crimes on Grindr.
Be aware that people may save, share, or search with the private information you share in chat such as messages or photos.
- Be aware that some “sextortion” scammers may record and use intimate messages or video content against you. Assume that anything may be recorded at any time.
- We don’t require face photos on profiles. You may use a photo of yourself that doesn’t show your face, or you can choose to not use a public photo at all.
- If you choose to share a photo, use a unique photo.
- If you use a photo that also shows up on a social media account, it will be easy for someone to do a reverse image search and find that social media information.
- You can send photos that expire after 1 view and that last for 10 seconds. More information on this feature is available here.
- We block the ability to take screenshots in Albums, so that’s a safer way to share photos. While we do our best to ensure the safety of this feature, please understand that people may use alternate means to save your images, (camera, secondary phone, alternate device, etc) and this is not a fail proof solution.
- You may want to talk via video chat to establish trust and get to know each other. (You can do this in the app from the chat interface. Select the camera icon below the text box, then the video icon, and Select “Call”).
- You can delete photos from your “My Photos” list. More information on this is available here.
If you want to exercise a high level of caution:
- Don’t show your face or any other identifiable feature, including tattoos, furniture, home decoration, or surrounding scenery.
- If you would like to send a picture, you can blur certain identifiable features to mask who you are (here’s how to blur your pictures on Android and iOS). Be aware that some software can reverse the blur feature, so you may want to crop out identifiable features instead.
- Clear metadata when you take a photo. Cameras automatically add metadata when you take a photo. This hidden info can include location, date, time, and location of the photo. Even if a photo doesn’t show your face or any other details that could expose your identity, a photo’s metadata can still be used to learn a great deal of information about you. There are many apps that remove this data for you before sharing photos with strangers.
- When talking to people you don’t know well, it’s better to cover the camera on your smartphone, laptop, or tablet. For Android users you can do it digitally with the Camera Blocker app.
Only share information with users you feel comfortable with and have established trust with over time.
- Think critically about what information you share with people.
- Do not post personal information to your public profile, and even in private, be cautious. Examples include phone number, address or other details about your residence, where you work, if you have children, your full name, valuable possessions you may have, your daily routines.
- Be cautious when connecting your social media accounts to your Grindr profile. Information shared freely on social media accounts may not be information that you want to share right away with someone on Grindr.
- Be aware of our Privacy Features, and know that you can delete any information you’ve added to Grindr at any time.