It’s safe to say we’re in a cruising renaissance. With just a few taps on your device, you can check into the closest orgy, see what times the local porn theater is most popular and find more potential partners than you might know what to do with.
Before the advent of location-based apps, cruising safety tips usually all boiled down to: pay attention, don’t be too obvious, don’t carry your wallet and watch out for cops looking to make a sting. When I asked friends for their safety tips for this article, I got more of the same: stay alert, keep it quiet and only carry an ID. One friend’s small pocket knife as part of their cruising kit was the most extreme of the safety measures offered (but in their words, they’re “really country”).
For marginalized folks like trans people or people of colour who worry about cruising grounds being inclusive or safe, that safety calculus may look like giving a friend your location or even bringing someone with you the first few times. (Pro tip: bring someone you wanna fuck so if the crowd is a bust you can still have your own fun).
And while digital cruising has exploded in recent years, do we know how safe we are on the apps? And how can we take some of that security into our own hands when seeking out sex partners digitally?
On the apps, you’re playing by spiritually similar but still different rules than in-person (or analog) cruising. The promises offered by new technologies don’t come freely, and users should still take standard precaution both in arranging meetups and in the information and media they put out on these platforms. That advice goes doubly on platforms where anonymity is more widely accepted.
Unlike “dating” apps like Grindr, Scruff or the litany of others like them, anonymity isn’t treated quite as harshly on cruising platforms, likely given the illicit nature of what we’re online to get off to.
The New Yorker’s recent feature about Sniffies, for example, reports that nearly two thirds of Sniffies users are under 30, but only a third describe themselves as gay. Even in metropolitan cities with reputations for queer acceptance, it’s common to encounter profiles that list themselves as DL or are just outright blank. Some may just value discretion, others might be simply exploring. Regardless, anonymity is less of a flaw and more of a feature of cruising apps. And that harkens back to some of what made in-person cruising so popular and necessary in the first place.
Leo Herrera, the author of a popular cruising guide that was recently amended to include an epilogue on apps, said in an interview that a key advantage to historical cruising was the anonymity and the implied social contract among those partaking in clandestine meetups.
The logic goes: the only way people know you were cruising was if they were too, so by outing you, they would in turn be outing themselves. This covenant was especially crucial in eras where being caught cruising came with worse consequences than your friends knowing you might be a bit of a slut—though for many that’s still true today. But that logic falls away in an era where you can check into a location, your avatar pops up wherever you are, or social media users popularize once clandestine cruising spots.
A common sense solution to this is to be mindful of what you post on these platforms. Digital security wardens warn not to share your location, post identifying images of your home, your school, your work—or your life in general in ways that will let people take advantage of these breadcrumbs you lay before them.
But those rules can feel obsolete on platforms where baring it all is part of the process. The advice then becomes much more individualized and it’s basically up to you, the user, to decide what information you’re comfortable having out there. And as Herrera writes in his book, oftentimes it’s the companies themselves who are using the information nefariously, not our fellow cruisers.
“I think we need to be even more aware now of the kinds of stuff that we share on there, because our medical data and our sexual habits and our sexual stories have been historically weaponized against us for a very, very long time that predates the internet,” Herrera tells Script. “So I think especially now, we need to be really aware of what we share on there and accept a level of exposure that’s going to come from that, because we don’t know what’s going to happen with this data.”
Grindr itself is facing international legal trouble for allegedly sharing personal information, including people’s HIV status, with third parties. A massive lawsuit was filed in 2024 in the U.K. and Norwegian privacy authorities fined the dating app company €6.5 million (now more than $7.5 million) for violating European Union privacy laws by sharing user data with advertisers. A Chinese company in 2020 sold Grindr for more than $600 million after a U.S. government panel raised national security concerns over the app’s foreign ownership.
For its part, Sniffies told The New Yorker it doesn’t sell or share user data to advertisers, third-party vendors or outside organizations. That seems to have largely assuaged cruisers’ concerns about the app, but that was before the news that Match Group (which owns websites and apps including Tinder, OKCupid, and Hinge) bought a minority share in Sniffies, including the right to increase its stake, for $100 million. The news sent social media ablaze, with lots of cruisers in my circle calling it the beginning of the end of the app altogether.
And for better or worse, Devon Price, a clinical associate professor at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, says that fears over blackmail and user data have waned as revenge porn laws proliferate and the consumer data bubble comes ever closer to bursting.
“There’s this feeling of like, everybody’s nudes are out there at this point,” Price said. “We’re kind of eventually going to drown in so much data that you can’t really use it against people.”
For trans people like Price, the apps can offer a place to cruise fewer of the potential negative interactions that come with being “other” in these spaces. It’s easier to weed out a transphobe, for example, on an app versus when you’re making a pass at them in a cruisey bathroom. Price previously published a cruising guide for trans and autistic people aimed at making the art of cruising more inclusive.
For Price, the apps are where they started cruising and the platforms helped them build confidence as they were moving through expressions of their gender.
“Getting that positive attention really early on, and just a huge volume of it made me realize, ‘okay, I’m not, like, winnowing down my options here. I’m not making myself like, unfuckable or unlovable,’” Price said. “I’m gonna have plenty of choices and plenty of agency moving through this space.”
And there are certainly cruisers who aren’t as concerned about anonymity, like Jonah Wheeler, a porn performer who regularly posts personal and educational content about cruising. Wheeler said in an interview that he isn’t worried about hiding his face on the apps given his line of work, but still takes steps to limit the information he shares both on the apps and online—and lauded platforms that give users greater control over how they appear to others.
One Sniffies feature he mentioned allowed users to hedge how accurate their location is when displayed to other users. For instance, instead of showing you sitting at home in your apartment, the app may show you down the street or several blocks away.
Wheeler also takes that same care when talking about cruising in his online content. He’s also mindful not to give too many identifying details about cruising spots or the like to protect both the sanctity of the space and those who rely on it. But he’s quick to say that safety is also a matter of common sense cruising (not doing it in a fairly obvious or heavily trafficked place, for example).
And Wheeler’s concerns about the sanctity and safety of these spaces aren’t exactly fabricated. In one of the most widely reported cruising stings in recent memory, Amtrak Police last year arrested dozens of people for public lewdness in New York City’s Penn Station last year—tremendously more than years before—and suspicions immediately arose that law enforcement had been using Sniffies to target cruising locations. In at least one instance, one person who was arrested was handed over to immigration authorities.
It’s worth noting that since 2022 Port Authority police (who oversee bus terminals and airports in New York and New Jersey) have been barred from undertaking similar plainclothes bathroom stings targeting cruising after lawsuits by men who say they were targeted for being queer—or because police believed they were.
Weeks before the reports of the Penn Station arrests, The New Yorker published its feature on Sniffies. And weeks later, The Cut followed with its own article on cruising, offering a more critical take on the role content creators play in the recent arrests. Critics of the articles, including Herrera, say the pieces themselves have a direct role to play in cruising crackdowns for the unnecessary light they shine on the admittedly legally precarious practice.
Cruising arrests aren’t anything new, but with law enforcement now openly using Sniffies to target cruising hotspots, the spectre of arrest feels more real now than in recent memory.
For Herrera, the Penn Station arrests illustrate why so many people are going analog with their cruising, opting for parks, bathhouses and bathrooms versus apps and websites.
“We’re sort of seeing firsthand the potential damage and the potential exposure that can come from that, especially if you could get in trouble with work, or you have a career that kind of data could be detrimental to your livelihood,” he said.
“I think we need to be a lot more discerning in what we share online, and also how we sort of fluctuate between analog and digital cruising, especially right now.”
This story was produced in collaboration with Script, Xtra’s sibling publication dedicated to LGBTQ2S+ health.
Why you can trust Xtra
