It Looks Like Grindr Has Blocked the Paris Olympic Village From Search

Grindr has, it seemed, blocked geolocation and search for the Olympic Village at this year's Paris Summer Games.

As various users on X-formerly-Twitter have noted, Grindr appears to be blocking any "explore" searches in the giant Olympic Village — that's where the athletes and their teams live during the event, basically — constructed among three neighborhoods in Paris for this year's summer games.

We've reached out to Grindr about the apparent block, but to get to the bottom of the story, Futurism used the gay hookup app's search function for ourselves to see if it was legit.

Per our perusal, it does indeed look like the Olympic Village is not searchable directly on the "explore" page nor when one zooms into the landmarked "Olympic and Paralympic Village" in the L'ile Saint-Denis neighborhood, where part of the makeshift commune is located.

If you search in any of the surrounding neighborhoods, though, one can find plenty of French hunks looking for love — though if any of them are Olympic athletes, they don't seem to be advertising as such.

Notably, Grindr has in the past taken steps to limit athletes' exposure during the Olympics on several occasions.

After a Daily Beast reporter outed a bunch of athletes who were using the gay dating app from the Olympic Village in Rio during the 2016 competitions, intense backlash resulted not only in the article in question being retracted, but also in greater calls for privacy for the participants. Given that some of them come from places where homosexuality is illegal or still considered a social taboo, it was a pretty salient ask.

By 2022, Grindr had begun limiting the visibility of athletes during that year's winter games in Beijing — though that move also came after Chinese officials seemed to get the app removed from app stores in an alleged effort to "tame bad behavior" as it hosted the Winter Olympics, too.

In a statement to the Daily Mail, a representative from the organizing committee behind the Paris 2024 Olympics said that while dating apps are accessible to athletes within the Olympic Village, "for some, geolocation has been deactivated by the app publisher."

At the end of the day, it's probably a good thing that the hoi polloi inside and outside of Paris can't see the who's who of queer Olympians ahead of this year's hotly-anticipated Olympics — and with the planning committee putting "no restrictions" on sex for and between athletes this year, it's hard to imagine them wanting to screw anyone outside the village, anyway.

After the publication of this story, Grindr posted a blog alerting the public to its "enhanced privacy" settings surrounding this year's games, including the disabling of its "Explore" and "Roam" features within the Olympic Village and the "show distance" feature being turned off by default unless a user chooses to manually turn it on.

Grindr has also added some new privacy features specifically for Olympians too, such as allowing them to send unlimited disappearing messages and disabling screenshots.

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