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Beijing Kunlun Tech, the parent company of the Grindr dating app, plans to sell the service after a US national security committee has discovered that the acquisition of the dating application l & rsquo; Last year posed a risk to national security, Reuters reported on Monday.
Quoting two sources close to the case, Reuters said that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), led by the US Treasury Department, had informed the company of its findings and that Kunlun had already set up a bank d & # 39; investment. manage the sale of Grindr.
According to the CFIUS, the acquisition of the application by Kunlun is unclear. A spokesman for the Ministry of Finance told Gizmodo in a statement by e-mail that he "does not comment on information related to specific CFIUS cases". A spokesman for Grindr did not immediately return a request for comment.
Kunlun acquired the company in total last year after acquiring a majority stake in dating service in 2016. As Reuters noted, Kunlun was already preparing for the Grindr IPO but has since refocused its efforts to discharge the service.
Grindr collects a wide range of personal data about its users, including localization, in-app messages and other media, as well as health-related information, such as the HIV status of the user. 39; user. Last year, a report from NBC News revealed a security vulnerability that allowed the service called C * ckblocked to access user data, including location information, using the Grindr API. In a separate report published in April, Norwegian researchers at SINTEF, a non-profit organization, discovered that Grindr shared the HIV status of its users, among other information, with third parties.
The US government has significantly tightened its grip on foreign investment in domestic firms, particularly in the technology front and in China. Speaking on China at the RSA cyber security conference this month, FBI director Christopher Wray said that "all that surprised me when I came back into this world, what most shocked me was the magnitude, the depth, the magnitude of the threat of counterintelligence. "
The already tenuous relationship between the United States and China has recently intensified following the Huawei fiasco and claims by the US government that the Chinese telecommunications company and its pursuit of 5G networks in the international market pose risks to national security. Earlier this month, Huawei announced that it is suing the US government for restrictions on its products.
According to Reuters, Kunlun turns to American investors and Grindr's competitors as potential buyers for the sale.
[Reuters]
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