Dating apps to stop under-18s access after child sex abuse cases linked to Grindr

Dating apps like Grindr and Tinder will have to implement tough age verification systems to stop children accessing their services by July this year, the media regulator Ofcom has said. 

The announcement follows an investigation by The i Paper which revealed that 130 police reports of child abuse have been filed since 2019 relating to minors who accessed Grindr, the dating app for LGBTQ community.

Ofcom, the body responsible for all broadcasting, online and telecommunications platforms, confirmed that within six months dating apps will be required to use several “highly effective age assurance” methods that are significantly more robust than is currently being used.

By July, all porn sites will also have to introduce age blocks to prevent under-18s seeing their content.

Almudena Lara, Ofcom’s online safety policy development director, said: “This is a big societal change and will require that we all go about doing things differently from what we are used to.”

The move comes in response to the Online Safety Act, which was passed by parliament in 2023 to keep children away from harmful or pornographic online content, but which has yet to be fully implemented.

The legislation left many unsure whether dating apps would be included, prompting widespread concern that children may still be able to access such services.

On Sunday, this paper revealed that in the last year alone, four children were allegedly raped by men they met on Grindr, with 13 serious sexual offences reported in the first ten months of 2024. It prompted the former justice secretary Lord Charlie Falconer to describe it as a “huge scandal”, one that is “likely the tip of the iceberg” and called on Ofcom “to produce as effective a series of codes of practice and guidance as possible”.

The following day, a 21-year-old man spoke out about his experiences on Grindr, meeting men off the app for sexual encounters from the age of 12. He was left traumatised and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

Responding to The i Paper’s investigation a spokesperson for Grindr said it took the issue of underage use of its platform extremely seriously and “goes to great lengths” to prevent children from accessing the app saying they have a moderation team to identify and ban accounts if they are suspected of belonging to minors. They said individuals can only download Grindr through the most age-restrictive settings on app stores intended for adult-only platforms and added, “there is no place in society for abuse of minors, and we wholly condemn anyone who commits crimes against underage individuals”.

Ofcom has published its guidance setting out the duties of all companies that provide adult material or host interactions between users that can be of an X-rated nature – and confirmed that dating apps are considered a “user-to-user” service. This means they must comply with the regulations to avoid them being accessed by children who could be targeted by paedophiles.

“We will be holding them to account to ensure that children under the age of 18 are not on the service,” said Almudena Lara. If found to be in breach of the laws and regulations, sanctions include fines of up to 10% of the company’s global revenues or £18million, whichever is greater.

From today, dating apps will have until April to carry out their own self-assessment to establish if children are accessing their platform, but “unless they are [already] implementing highly effective age assurance, as per our guidance, they should assume that children are using their service,” said Ms Lara.

Those companies will then have to introduce rigorous age vetting. Ofcom outlined the type of methods that it will deem sufficient to comply with its regulations, and therefore with the Online Safety Act.

They include “open banking”, whereby the information a bank has on record about an individual is shared with the adult platform,– but only relating to whether they are over 18. “Photo identification matching”, in which photo ID such as passports or driving licenses are uploaded and compared with the platform’s user, to ensure it’s the same person. And “facial age estimation”, which is a piece of technology that estimates the user’s age by their facial features.

Other methods include “email-based age estimation” in which software can analyse through your emails whether you use services which require you to be 18, including credit cards. Anyone who uses a credit card, which is confirmed to the adult platform, would also be considered a good enough age check system.

Many have raised concerns about privacy and data sharing issues, however, that arise from the Online Safety Act and Ofcom’s related guidelines. But according to the regulator, members of the public will be protected by existing legislation including the Data Protection Act 2018.

“For companies that are not complying with these rules, we will be referring them to the ICO [Information Commissioner’s Office],” said Ms Lara.

Grindr and Tinder have been contacted for comment on the Ofcom decision.