Dating app Tinder has acceded to Russian demand to turn over user data to government authorities for examination and monitoring.
While no user data has yet been surrendered to Russian regulators as of the middle of June, Tinder has agreed to join a government register of websites and services that turn over such information as passwords, geolocation details, photos and videos to government agencies.
Valerie Sperling filed this report for the Washington Post:
The Kremlin isn’t the only government to take an interest in its population’s dating and sexual habits. It took until 2003 for the Supreme Court to finally strike down state laws against private sexual acts other than heterosexual intercourse between consenting adults. In the same year, Great Britain finally eliminated Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, which banned local governments from “promoting” homosexuality.
The current Russian government could mine Tinder’s user data to find anyone who’s interested in the same sex or who identifies as transgender, which could endanger people in a relatively antigay society. Or it could find and blackmail political activists for any unusual sexual or intimate interests, or for flirting or sexting outside their publicly known relationships. Putin’s regime has tried to use sexual entrapment against political opponents before. Having Tinder’s database at hand would make such tactics extremely easy to use. Including Tinder on the Russian data-sharing registry signals the state’s interest in monitoring citizens’ private lives — with the goal of narrowing the public sphere as much as possible.
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In the age of the smartphone, the technologies themselves are beyond state control. Authoritarian regimes aiming to tightly manage the political sphere therefore want to monitor private activity — including what people do together while “horizontal” — as much as they want to watch and limit public protest. Russia’s laws levy large fines on unsanctioned protest and on insulting public officials. The goal is to restrict public discussion and prevent criticism of Putin’s government from spreading.
The regime has also sought to promote traditional (read: anti-liberal, anti-Western) values by enacting laws that punish any discussion of homosexuality in the presence of minors, often called the “homosexual propaganda” ban. Linking heterosexuality to patriotic national values reinforces the heteronormative masculinity on which Putin’s macho leadership and political legitimacy rest. And it further restricts publicly acceptable speech and action, just as the laws restricting protest do.
