A Catholic priest who was allegedly outed as gay because his Grindr data suggested he was visiting gay venues is now suing the gay hookup app for violating his privacy.
Starting in 2016, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, a priest from Wisconsin, served as the former general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which serves as the Roman Catholic Church’s official mouthpiece in the United States, and frequently rails against laws and policies that recognize the rights of LGBTQ people.
But in 2021, Burrill resigned from his position within the church after The Pillar, a right-wing Catholic activist website, claimed to have uncovered mobile app data showing that he had not only used the Grindr app but had visited a gay bar and multiple bathhouses.
The Pillar did not say where or how it had obtained this data, saying the information on Burrill’s alleged whereabouts was based on “commercially available records of app signal data.”
While the data didn’t include names or pictures of users, Grindr assigns a unique number to each phone and tracks timestamped location data based on GPS signals. The news site also said it hired an independent firm to authenticate the information.
Based on that unique ID number, and cross-referencing data on the whereabouts of potential clergy members, The Pillar claimed to have used the Grindr data to allegedly track Burrill to a gay bar, a Las Vegas bathhouse, and bathhouses in other cities he visited as part of his work.
The Pillar concluded that Burrill may have been engaging in extramarital homosexual trysts, thereby breaking his vows of celibacy and violating Church teaching opposing sex outside of heterosexual marriage.
Shortly after the story broke, Burrill resigned from his position. In 2022, he was reassigned and now works as the parochial administrator of a parish in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
In the lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California, Burrill alleges he was “smeared with false and lurid claims, including a strong suggestion that Burrill, by using Grindr, was ‘only a step away from sexual predation,’ and falsely suggesting [he] might have been involved with minors” by the article in The Pillar.
He says that the outlet’s reporting destroyed his reputation.
But rather than go after The Pillar, Burrill has instead decided to sue Grindr for allegedly selling his data to other entities, from whom other third parties obtained it.
In a June letter addressed to Grindr, one of Burrill’s attorneys, James Carr, said Burrill would never have used Grindr if he had known his data wouldn’t be kept private.
Carr threatened to sue the company if it didn’t compensate Burrill with $5 million and initiate “other corrective actions” to prevent similar leaks of users’ personal data.
The company refused, prompting the lawsuit, reports The Washington Post.
Burrill claims that The Pillar obtained the data regarding his app use from Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal (CLCR), a right-wing Denver-based nonprofit.
CLCR claims to “empower the church to carry out its mission” by giving bishops “evidence-based resources” with which to identify weaknesses in how they train priests.
However, the chief aim of the group appears to be to purge the priesthood of individuals who are not celibate, with particular interest in those who are gay. The Post previously reported that the group spent millions of dollars to obtain data from apps like Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, Jack’d, and OkCupid.
Jayd Henricks, president of the CLCR, told the Post that his organization retrieved Grindr data in order to alert bishops to the behavior of priests violating their vows of celibacy. He had previously written in the religious journal First Things that CLCR had been given “publicly available data, bought in the ordinary way” about the use of various hookup apps by clergy members. However, Henricks denied sharing that data with The Pillar.
Burrill alleges in his lawsuit, that, from 2017 to 2021, Grindr sold his data to companies and data vendors. Carr said that, for his client, being outed unintentionally was both harmful and traumatizing.
“To have that decision forced out of your hands and into the public realm is reprehensible,” Carr told the Post.
Greg Helmer, another of Burrill’s attorneys, told McClatchy News that Burrill’s legal team hopes to learn in court where CLCR obtained its data. “We want answers so we can use that as a warning to other Grindr users,” he told the news service.
Burrill is also seeking an unspecified amount in damages and restitution. He has asked for a jury trial.
Following the story in The Pillar, Grindr published a blog post that examined three possible ways that the outlet could have obtained Burrill’s data, none of which involved a breach by Grindr.
According to that post, the identifying data may have come from network providers, such as mobile carriers, ISPs, or WiFi owners; from location data brokers; or from current or former Grindr partners or one of their downstream ad partners.
A Grindr spokesperson told McClatchy News that the platform “intends to respond vigorously” to Burrill’s allegations in the lawsuit, which it says “are based on mischaracterizations of practices relating to user data from more than four years ago.”
Grindr has previously been accused of sharing user data, including sensitive personal information, with commercial third parties, who subsequently sought to sell that data to other companies to carry out targeted advertising campaigns. In 2020, the company changed its privacy and user consent guidelines.
However, since then, several lawsuits have been filed seeking to hold the company liable for information shared in prior years, including one, filed in April in the U.K., that alleges that the app shared sensitive data, including user’s HIV statuses, with third-party vendors.
The company was recently fined nearly $6 million by Norwegian regulators who claimed the app had shared users’ personal data with numerous commercial third parties. The company has since said it is considering appealing a court decision upholding the fine.
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