Catholic priest quits after ?anonymized? data revealed alleged use of Grindr

In what appears to be a first, a public figure has been ousted after de-anonymized mobile phone location data was publicly reported, revealing sensitive and previously private details about his life.Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill was general secretary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), effectively the highest-ranking priest in the US who is not a bishop, before records of Grindr usage obtained from data brokers was correlated with his apartment, place of work, vacation home, family members' addresses, and more. The analysis also looked at other locations farther afield, including his family lake house, his family members’ residences, and an apartment in his Wisconsin hometown where he reportedly has lived.The de-anonymized data revealed that a mobile device that appeared at those locations—likely Burrill’s phone, The Pillar says—used Grindr almost daily. The Pillar presented this information to the USCCB in advance of publication, and yesterday, the conference announced Burrill’s resignation.While this might be the first case of a public figure’s online activities being revealed through aggregate data, “it unfortunately happens very often” to the general public, Andrés Arrieta, director of consumer privacy engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars.