Parliament Staff, Visitors Tried Getting on Grindr 250,000 Times in One Month

Despite employees being banned from accessing "explicit" sites on their 8,500 internal computers, Mirror reports that House of Commons staff and visitors attempted to access Grindr more than 250,000 times in just one month. The data comes from Freedom of Information, which requested to see a sample in 2016 of the Parliament's Internet traffic across several months.

In addition to Grindr, which received 272,000 total hits, sites like Fab Swingers, Swinging Heaven, Gaydar and YouPorn also registered hundreds of hits; Adultwork, an escort site, saw more than 100 attempted hits, and FOI's report recorded nearly 3,000 attempts to visit an unnamed hardcore gay porn site.

"All adult websites are blocked on Parliament's computer network," said a Parliamentary spokesman. "The vast majority of 'attempts' to access them are not deliberate. The data shows 'requests' to access websites, not visits to them. Pop-up adverts make up a significant number of these 'attempts,' which the computer user would not even have been aware of."

FOI's data covers both Houses and all users of the Parliamentary network, from Members of the House of Lords to staff of the House Administrations. The report also includes users of the guest wi-fi service, which they can access on personal devices,