Hornet

Hornet bills itself the better privacy alternative to Grindr for gay and bisexual men looking for hookups and dates. How does it do? Well, to be honest, it's not hard to be better than Grindr when it comes to privacy and protecting users' sensitive personal information. Hornet does do a better job for sure. They don't appear to sell or share users' personal information. They haven't had any known data breaches or leaks in recent years. And in response to the news Grindr was sharing their users' HIV status with outside companies, Hornet specifically put out a statement saying they would never do that, in part because they have members of the company living with HIV who understand just how sensitive that information is. This is all great to see. What wasn't great to see was that Hornet doesn't require a strong password to login to the app -- we were able to use 123456. For a company that touts itself for its privacy and security practices, this is a pretty big flaw. We also weren't able to determine if the app encrypted all the users' messages, location data, chats, and pictures. All in all, Hornet is a much better option for gay and bisexual men than Grindr. It has some flaws we'd like to see fixed, given that it is still dangerous in many parts of the world for gay and bisexual men to live openly.