This week, Tea, a provocative dating app that allows women to anonymously question or warn one another about males they’ve met, shot to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store. The application’s developer acknowledged the attack on Friday: Selfies were among the thousands of photos that were leaked online.
Tea Dating Advice Inc., a San Francisco-based company, said in a statement that it has hired outside cybersecurity specialists and is working around the clock to secure its systems.
According to 404 Media, which first reported the breach, 4Chan users found an exposed database that made the content from Tea accessible to anybody.
The app and the hack show how dangerous it is to look for love in the social media era.
Here’s what you should know:
Tea was designed to make dating safer for women.
As stated on the app’s website, Tea was established in 2022 by software engineer Sean Cook, who had previously worked at Shutterfly and Salesforce. Cook was inspired by his own mother’s horrific experiences. These included being duped by individuals using false identities and unintentionally dating men with criminal backgrounds, according to Cook.
Tea positions itself as a secure method for women to discreetly screen potential partners they may encounter on dating apps like Tinder or Bumble, making sure the guys are who they claim to be, no criminals, and neither married nor in a relationship. According to Aaron Minc, whose Cleveland business, Minc Law, focuses on instances involving internet harassment and defamation, it’s as though everyone have their own little Yelp sites.
One lady said in an Apple Store review that she used a Tea search to look into a man who had been seeing and found more over 20 warning signs, including grave accusations of assault and filming women without their permission. She claimed to have cut off contact. She wrote, “I can’t imagine how things could have gone had I not known.”
According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, Tea rose to the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store on July 24 due to a spike in social media engagement over the previous week. Tea downloads increased 525% for the seven days from July 17–23 in comparison to the previous week. In an Instagram post, Tea claimed to have 4 million followers.
Tea has come under fire for violating men’s privacy.
Tea is a man-shaming website, according to a female columnist for The Times of London newspaper who downloaded the app on Thursday. She also said that this is merely vigilante justice that depends solely on the scruples of anonymous women. What male would ever dare date a woman again with Tea around?
We’ve had hundreds of calls about it over the past few weeks. “It’s blown up,” lawyer Minc stated. People are angry. They are being given names. They are being humiliated.
Legislation shielding websites and applications from responsibility for user-posted content was passed by Congress in 1996. However, Minc stated that the users could face legal action for disseminating inaccurate and disparaging material.
However, according to Bloomberg Law, a federal judge in Illinois dismissed a man’s invasion-of-privacy complaint in May after he had received criticism from women in the Facebook discussion group Are We Dating the Same Guy.
According to Minc, state privacy laws can provide an additional means of pursuing legal action against an individual who harmfully disclosed your photo or other personal information online.
Thousands of selfies and photo IDs were made public by the hack.
According to Tea’s statement, 13,000 photos of selfies or other forms of identification that users provided when verifying their accounts were among the approximately 72,000 photos that were stolen online. According to the company’s announcement, an additional 59,000 publicly accessible photographs from posts, comments, and direct messages were also obtained using the app.
According to the company, only consumers who registered before February 2024 are impacted by the incident, and neither phone numbers nor email addresses were compromised. As of right now, there is no proof that any other user data was impacted. Tea stated that safeguarding the data and privacy of its users is our top priority.
It stated that users did not had to remove their accounts or change their passwords. Every piece of data has been protected.
Attorney Minc stated that he did not find it surprising that Tea was singled out. According to him, these websites are assaulted. They make adversaries. They set themselves up as targets for anyone who choose to pursue them.
