Qué Putería: Care on Dating Apps is a Collective Matter, Too

Around an olla comunitaria (community pot: an outdoor community kitchen, usually run by women using donated food and set up as a care space to feed people during crises and protest) in one of central Medellín’s neighbourhoods, a printed publication is being passed from hand to hand. As some trans women cook food to be shared with the community in a few hours, others hand out neon-coloured publications to passersby. The cover of the publication reads Qué Putería. It is a logbook of digital care for dating app users. Qué Putería is a polysemous expression in Spanish: in one context it can convey admiration for something; in other contexts intense anger; and it can even be associated with promiscuity. This is no institutional pamphlet or technical guide: it is a zine made to be scribbled on, underlined and, above all, spark outrage.

How was Qué Putería: the dating app digital safety guide created?

Qué Putería grew out of the Digital Health and Rights Project (DHRP), a transnational partnership that uses participatory action research to build knowledge and expertise in national and global civil society networks. It is active in countries including Vietnam, Ghana, Kenya and Colombia. In Colombia, Fundación Karisma worked hand in hand with a Community Advisory Team (CAT) made up mostly of young LGBTQ+ activists to inform the content of the guide, taking into consideration their questions, doubts and fears. Qué Putería contains digital security and privacy tips for using dating apps such as Grindr and Badoo. 

Why a digital safety guide about dating apps?

Fundación Karisma's advocacy is centred around guaranteeing digital rights in Colombia. Whilst fighting for digital rights, Fundación Karisma realised that their advocacy could not be aimed only at influencing the public agenda or the Congress of Colombia; it also had to be brought back to the communities most affected by public digital infrastructure and Big Tech.

The community advisory team members spoke of insecurity, doubt and their fears in inhabiting the internet, particularly for activists in a country like Colombia. Plenty of digital security materials for activists already exist —Karisma itself has produced several— so the question became a different one: what was missing? Through dialogue with the community, a gap emerged: there were no digital security guides designed specifically for dating apps in Spanish and in accessible language that would attract young people. Grindr and Badoo were identified as the apps most used by their communities.

How the guide was built by the community

The research for the guide drew on three sources: an analysis of both the apps' privacy and data-processing policies; a press review of digital and physical security incidents experienced by LGBTQ+ people in Colombia after using dating apps; and a focus group with the CAT.

One finding ran through it all: it is impossible to talk about digital security on these apps without talking about the processing of personal data. Drawing also on analyses by other organisations, they found that these applications collect more than 56 types of personal data, including weight, height, sexual orientation and even HIV status. This led them to understand care not only as an individual practice, but as collective action: demanding transparency and accountability over how people’s personal and potentially sensitive data is collected and processed.

A printed format: pushing back against the digital

Fundación Karisma deliberately chose a physical format: a printed zine —alongside a digital version— meant to be touched, read, marked up and shared. A way of moving these conversations out of the purely digital and into in-person spaces to open up other dialogues and reflections.

A guide with a wide reach

It was the CAT members who mediated the spaces through which the guide travelled: preparatory meetings for the Pride march in Puerto Asís, Putumayo; a community pot in a Medellín neighbourhood where sex work takes place —where a digital security workshop was also held—; and the Pride march in Bogotá.

The project also made it possible to bring other Fundación Karisma materials into spaces that the organisation could never have reached alone, for example a prison in Antioquia and a rural school in Putumayo.

Building on the needs of affected communities

The most valuable part of this project was building from the real needs of the affected communities: materials anchored in people's everyday experience and, later, driven by those same people, whose activism carried useful digital rights resources to new communities.

Fundación Karisma also learned to approach personal data protection from a gender perspective. Their short-term goal is to keep researching what these community contributions mean for discussions such as the reform of Colombia's habeas data law.

In the end, defending the right to privacy means making sure that people understand when and how their data is being used, and giving them the tools to protect their own data.

About Fundación Karisma

This article was written by Fundación Karisma, a civil society organisation dedicated to supporting and disseminating the good use of technologies in digital environments, social processes and public policies in Colombia and the region, with a human rights focus.