I see feature requests for account validation / authentication with votes of well over 12k in this forum alone. This is clearly the utmost importance to your users.

I believe we have a lot of low hanging fruit to weed out the noise accounts (fake, spam, solicitation, dangerous, etc.) leaving a grid users can count on as clean, real, accurately represented people and have confidence that Grindr support has the tools necessary to step in and help when necessary.

That being said, I recommend the use of MAC and IP addresses to help improve the experience around this issue. Phone and email are easily created for free and are small points of friction for those creating fake or fraudulent accounts. They also offer little to no traceability for enforcement of legal action where necessary.

While IP addresses may be proxied, requiring exposure (to get around VPN protections) will at least help authorities trace the IP to ISP of origin and take appropriate action from there.

MAC addresses do not currently have a way to be altered or proxied. If Grindr requires access / systematic disclosure of each device that logs into the platform and associates it [them] with the IPs and email addresses, this creates a significantly stronger reliability of authentication / know your customer chain. I would suggest MAC be [part of] an account's UPK. At minimum, this would require banned people to purchase new devices if they intend to create new accounts before their ban expires, something I believe to be a large and costly deterant. This would also require that virtual devices may not be used to access the Grindr platform in production. Being a systematic step, user experience should not be impacted except in cases where they attempt to block their MAC and/or IP. Little to no new friction.

I think this is the best option we currently have to limit banned people from re-entering the platform. Equally as important, impersonation where nudity is involved and/or a minor is illegal in many locations. MAC plus IP would be a significant help to authorities to track down the person behind the account for appropriate action.

Additionally, this does provide broader user analytics in the form of a user view across all their accounts, devices, and access points / locations - better targeted marketing (and more) for you :-)

Another feature request of importance in the same domain of topic: I have become a pro at spotting fake accounts at a quick glance. If a human can do that, a machine can do...often better. I recommend implementation of ML to both identify potential fake / impersonation accounts and accounts not compliant with legal [EULA and T&Cs] conditions. Use cases include a basic MVP of accounts where words have capital Ts not as the first letter of a word which most often represents the solicitation or elicitation of "Tina" aka crystal methamphetamine, links to other sites for **** spam, the word "purchase"; to more advanced cases such as integrating with Google's image search API to identify potential celebrity / well-known persons being impersonated in the account before they go live and many, many more cases. Combining ML and the user reports to feed into it's nueral network for new pattern potentials work collaboratively for a significantly more powerful and efficient solution. Identified potentials could then be submitted for review by your operational staff and flow downstream in the existing process for action.

When you go to send a picture to someone in a chat, after clicking on the camera button to show "my photos", it would be great to be able to preview the entire photo before sending it. Maybe a long tap? The square previews don't always show enough of the picture to know what is in it.

Also, we should be able to rearrange the photos, in the "my photos" collection. That way, you can put pics you use most up at the top or group them together by what's in the pics.

Completly unecessary some pepole may not have photo I.d then what it would create way to many problems for People who are actually of age

My account got banned I haven’t crossed any illegal activities as mentioned here
I need specific reason for my account gets banned

I’m am a Grindr user for more than 10 years, sometimes I subscribed. The reason I’m writing is that adds are so invasive than ever, abusive in many cases. You pay much attention in moderate profile photos while drug dealers openly operate through the application, including *** services. Please cut the “taps” off make optional and stop invasive adds, as I need to close them twice to acces the app. Thanks

What an absolute joke this app is. I must report tens of profiles a day for being obvious scam accounts. Some of them, they don't even ban. I reported one today. 8 hours later, it's still there. I report AGAIN and few moments later THEY ACTUALLY BAN ME. WTF??

This wasn't even a questionable profile. It's obvious it's a bot and they clearly said in chat to visit some site to get the "LGBTQ ID" lol. Absolutely ridiculous and these idiots won't reply to my ticket.

This app has become nearly unusable, I opened it 5 times today, 5 times I had to report a spam account and block it too. Grindr is not taking any action to solve this, so only one thing to do, stop using it, in favour of other applications. I'm leaving a bad review in the Google Play Store too, so new users are well informed. I suggest you do the same, and only update it after Grindr took serious action to make their platform honest. (IE: Keep bots, fakers, catfishes,... off it)

Banned from your app without any reason or substation! Please! This is a crazy inconsistency! Why was I banned? No reason given; no opportunity for an explanation or defense? Can any user ask to have another user banned? If this is how this app works, then I am much better without it in my life! I am NO *** worker nor a drug addict, whom you allow on your site! Awful !

@Igor that's a very stupid idea

Banned no explanation ???
Stopped using app
Plenty of other sites

My profile was banned twice, The first time someone realized I shouldn't have been and reopened my account. Now I have been banned again, I have sent heaps of messages asking why but I only get a generated response. Now the system has blocked my email add

I’ve been banned and can’t find out why, stopped using app

👎 Terrible idea to give a big tech company more info about you considering the history of large company data breaches. A better idea would be for Grindr to prove a "block multiple people at once" feature so you could quickly and easily rid the grid of everything you're not interested in and focus more on what you like.

My account got banned for NO REASON, I was talking to a friend about another friend who passed away and now I can't contact my friend now, I put in to review it and remove the ban but A COMPUTER keeps replying with the same ANSWER, a real person would listen and REMOVE IT not discriminate and upset me,...
How would you feel about not being able to find out about YOUR FRIENDS FUNERAL, you'd be devastated wouldn't you....?

Obviously there are a LOT of fake profiles and spam profiles out there.

It would be much easier to identify a fake profile IF a new account user was NOT allowed to turn OFF the distance on the profile for 30 days, for example.

This would quickly alert us to pay extra special attention to messages from hundreds or thousands miles away.

Broken English and other terms would be more obvious as well to your subscribers.

If I suspect a new account (not showing distance) of being spam, I ask them "WHAT CITY" they are in. If they beat around the bush and don't answer the question, they are suspect.

I found that this eliminates 95% of the spammers making contact with me. I report every one!

SHOWING THE DISTANCE IN NEW PROFILES would perhaps help alert others to this issue of this spam problem.

Thank you for listening.

Yes, it is time to find a new platform for meeting. They are not regulating Grndr at all and it’s become the Bot Zone for fake Profiles! I read that it’s owned by a homophobic man also... Is this true? I haven’t eaten Jesus Chicken in years because of this behavior. Why would I give someone else money???

Bots & Spam
I have cancelled my subscription to Grindr many times. What brings me back, of course, is the extremely rare chance that I may actually MEET someone. For fun, ***, friendship, whatever. What drives me away frequently are all the Bots who respond to my profile. I mean, who falls for this stuff? Any time any handsome, young, far-away lad IMs me, I assume they aren't real. They've gotten clever. They ask for my phone #. They insist they ARE real. What is the point of all this? Does Grindr profit in some way from FAKE profiles?
It's too much. It's a waste of time and energy. I would NEVER pay to subscribe to this service. If it's not bots, it's suffering through ads for ridiculous video games and apps. What a waste. I feel dirty.

It's absolutely disgusting that people can get away with things like sending you death threats & nasty messages only for them to block you before you can report their foul behavior. LET US REPORT THESE PEOPLE AFTER THEY BLOCK US

Yet another man has been brutally attacked by people with a fake Grindr account. This has to stop and I will not be using the app until they implement this feature and start protecting their users.
They are showing themselves to have utter disregard or even contempt for their audience and anyone with any self-respect should boycott until they acknowledge this and implement changes

https://www.out.com/news/2019/10/16/gay-man-beaten-hammers-after-being-lured-grindr?fbclid=IwAR22HfbaWThbQ0o4ec1AWrKhMdtqXFXHQXrIYnhwIoPUHeWzV6yj3KHEL-E.

Please let me know who or why