Educate on consent! Don’t promote assault!

If a person has NSFW set to ‘Never’ on their profile, herein as the receiver, the following should happen:

• A user sending a photo to the receiver receives a pop up dialog box informing them that the user does not consent to NSFW photos and asks the sender whether they would like to proceed with sending the photos.
• The sender has the option to press “Yes - these photos are safe” and the photos would proceed to send. The sender could press “No - these photos are NSFW” and the photos wouldn’t send.
• If the sender presses “Yes”, the sender would be additionally informed that sending explicit images would violate the consent of the receiver. A new dialog box would re-prompt the sender to confirm to proceed to send. (OR a warning similar to this would appear within the first dialog box).
• The dialog box would also include at the bottom a hyperlink to a Grindr website informing them of consent when sending sexual imagery.

To mitigate the risk of the sender violating the consent of the receiver and proceeding to send NSFW photos despite being informed thereof, the receiver should experience the following:

• All photos received are subject to blanket censoring whereby a photo is blurred or hidden with the warning that a photo could be explicit. The receiver has the option to view the image should they choose to.
• You could instead opt for an automatic screening protocol to censor images deemed NSFW but this would have to be done in a way that adheres to the data privacy of the sender.
• If a photo is deemed NSFW when the receiver does not consent to these images, then the receiver would have the option to report the sender.

The sender would also be pre-warned that clicking “Yes” in order to send explicit images would breach Grindr community guidelines by the violation of the receiver’s consent and that the receiver would be in the right to report the sender and the potential consequence of this for the sender.

Grindr has an obligation to not only protect the consent of its users but also to educate those on consent too. This is why I think a solution which aims to only censor NSFW photos from users who do not consent to them on their profile does not solve the issue. The dialog box serves a great educational purpose to make users understand consent regarding the sending of sexual imagery to make the app and society safer for everyone in this community.

If Grindr doesn’t choose to enact this, then it cannot be said that the highest priority of those at Grindr is to educate the community on consent and is instead complicit by negligence in the assault of its users in receiving sexual imagery without that consent.