Do you have any idea how hard/illegal it is to hack into those servers and manually delete every file relating to JUST your profile without alerting an admin?

You forgot the cold storage backups. Its just plain impossible with anything more serious than a hobby project.

Made me laugh - thank you.

lol, that means nothing. It most likely means that data is marked as deleted but the original values are retained.

Except that if a user fills in a Grindr profile, they believe they are only sharing information with Grindr/its users. The truth is that they share all of the information (in less than secure ways) with a variety of third parties and fail to disclose that fact. That's illegal in many countries (including mine) and it demonstrates an unbelievable lack of regard for user privacy or safety.

> That's illegal in many countries (including mine) and it demonstrates an unbelievable lack of regard for user privacy or safety.

There's a very strong chance that this is illegal in many states in the US as well (not sure about federal law).

Not only does it get shared, it gets shared in bulk. That's a huge difference between the intended use and what actually happens.

Correction: you can mark it as deleted.