Regardless, it was damning enough that Burrill left his position over it, and the Pillar says it’s possible that Burrill will face “canonical discipline” as well. The report, which presents Burrill’s apparent use of a gay dating app as “serial sexual misconduct” and inaccurately conflates homosexuality and dating app usage with pedophilia, simply says it was “commercially available app signal data” obtained from “data vendors.” We don’t know who those vendors are, nor the circumstances around that data’s purchase. There’s still a lot we don’t know here, including the source of the Pillar’s data. Burrill resigned his position shortly before the Pillar published its investigation. Here’s what happened: A Catholic news outlet called the Pillar somehow obtained “app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr.” It used this to track a phone belonging to or used by Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who was an executive officer of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. It also shows the need for real regulations on the data broker industry that knows so much about so many but is beholden to so few laws. It can then have dire consequences for users who may have had no idea their data was being collected and sold in the first place.
It shows how, despite app developers’ and data brokers’ frequent assurances that the data they collect is “anonymized” to protect people’s privacy, this data can and does fall into the wrong hands. One of the worst-case scenarios for the barely regulated and secretive location data industry has become reality: Supposedly anonymous gay dating app data was apparently sold off and linked to a Catholic priest, who then resigned from his job.