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To respond to Grindr's obscuring of the exact distance between some users, the Kyoto researchers' used a "colluding" trilateration attack. "In the US that's not a problem but in Islamic countries or in Russia, it can be very serious that their information is leaked like that." "You can easily pinpoint and reveal a person," says Hoang. That added degree of invasion means that even particularly privacy-oriented gay daters-which could include anyone who perhaps hasn't come out publicly as LGBT or who lives in a repressive, homophobic regime-can be unwittingly targeted. And unlike previous methods of tracking those apps, the researchers say their method works even when someone takes the precaution of obscuring their location in the apps’ settings. (He went on to demonstrate as much with my test accounts on those competing services.) In a paper published last week in the computer science journal Transactions on Advanced Communications Technology, Hoang and two other researchers at Kyoto University describe how they can track the phone of anyone who runs those apps, pinpointing their location down to a few feet. Hoang says his Grindr-stalking method is cheap, reliable, and works with other gay dating apps like Hornet and Jack'd, too. In fact, the outline fell directly on the part of my apartment where I sat on the couch talking to him. "I think this is your location?" he asked. Ten minutes after that, he sent me a screenshot from Google Maps, showing a thin arc shape on top of my building, just a couple of yards wide. Within fifteen minutes, Hoang had identified the intersection where I live. For anyone in that neighborhood, my cat photo would appear on their Grindr screen as one among hundreds of avatars for men in my area seeking a date or a casual encounter. A minute later I called Nguyen Phong Hoang, a computer security researcher in Kyoto, Japan, and told him the general neighborhood where I live in Brooklyn. I set my profile photo as a cat, and carefully turned off the "show distance" feature in the app's privacy settings, an option meant to hide my location. Then I installed the gay hookup app Grindr. A few days ago, I warned my wife that the experiment I was about to engage in was entirely non-sexual, lest she glance over my shoulder at my iPhone.