Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media.
I can’t open the article, but I think I read that this was hosted on an unprotected bucket. Assuming that’s correct I wouldn’t say this was a breach. A better headline would be “Women dating safety app ‘Tea’ exposed women’s PII”.
To be 100% clear, I’m not excusing the hackers. I don’t believe it’s morally correct to publicize something because it is exposed. For folks curious about that you can look into how to ethically disclose vulnerabilities. I still view this as doxxing. I still believe what the hackers did should be a criminal offense, it’s just that I also believe the app holds a ton of the blame as well. How can you proclaim to be about keeping women safe while putting them at risk? That should be punished as well.
Like if the storage facility you trusted to hold your stuff never had locks on the doors, shouldn’t they take a lot of the blame as well as the thief who found out a door was unlocked?
They also said they deleted IDs once users were verified. The breach proved that to be an outright lie.
Criminal negligence.
I would not under any circumstances give my drivers license to a for profit app. I don’t even like to give my email.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but the idea of “verifying” my real identity to a faceless website or mobile app is abhorrent.
I guess it doesn’t help that governments in some countries (UK, Australia that I know of) are encouraging this bullshit with Trojan horse laws claiming to protect children from adult websites / social media.
Can’t help but think there is also an element of pot meet kettle here, when users of an app designed to dox and slander people without their knowledge are now the ones getting doxxed themselves.
What if they take people’s biometric aka fingerprint and to view nsfw stuff you goota use the biometric and I am not talking about passkey
How does having my fingerprint prove my age.
The issue is, at some point, they have to connect your “digital you” to your self as a real person, after that they can track you, keep tabs on you. If that data was ever stolen, or a corrupt government rose to power, you’re really screwed.
What if they fucked right off and left parenting what kids do on their devices to their parents?
California, Utah, Texas all have laws now requiring age verification to use an app store
I’d be interested to know how that works with F-Droid or Aurora.
If you think that’s the same thing, you don’t understand at least on of those things, but safe money is both…
Never upload PII to social media
Your privacy is not legally protected.
Another example of why people shouldn’t be uploading/sharing nudes on any platform when the pretense is that it will only be between 2 people. That just isn’t realistic anymore. Never was, really. I still don’t get how people can hear and know about all the hacks happening now but they can’t see that sending nudes is somehow unsafe? Why does society work this way?
Send nudes on Signal!
The replies in this thread are disturbing, giving me a sense that Lemmy has a misogyny problem; maybe I was naïve, but I expected outrage about 4chan doxxing women trying to protect one another, instead I see lots of revenge enjoyment as if being doxxed on 4chan is justice for … <checks notes> warning one another about dangerous men they encounter when dating?
The inability to empathize and take seriously the threats posed to women or to understand their motivation to protect one another is alarming.
There is no good faith extended, but also no evidence presented that instead of safety the app was just for gossip, it’s just taken as assumed that women are wrong for using Tea and they all deserve to be doxxed.
Your comment was on top for me in my app, so I was like “oh how bad could it be.”. Holy shit you’re not wrong, there’s some disgusting comments that are getting voted up.
I’m low-key disappointed and appalled by these community members who believe these women “deserve” it for … Trying to help each other be safer?
saw this happening here, saw it happening in reddit threads on the topic, saw it all over the media cycle in the comments.
i agree, people’s visceral backlash against this app is steeped in a deep misogyny. most of these comments have a vapid absence of any sort of even basic recognition towards these women as people. talking about them like they’re abstract figures or test subjects up in here.
watching people take somewhat valid privacy concerns as an excuse to let loose their most toxic feelings towards women used to be the sort of thing only losers or emboldened megalomaniacs did in public, even just a decade ago.
in the past years i’ve just seen all my peers, regardless of political affiliation, manipulated into a cult of outrage that serves as another hamster wheel upon which capital may spin.
imtiredboss.png
Let’s say a vile, manipulative, entitled woman went on a Tinder date with a guy. He insists on splitting the bill rather than paying for her food. She feels insulted.
She then takes to Tea and her local Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group, slanders him with false accusations that he tried to sexually assault her, then posts his Tinder, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles online. Suddenly he’s being ostracized, receiving nasty messages and even loses his job from women bombarding his employer with negative phone calls, emails and comments about him.
Men have had their lives ruined by false allegations posted to AWDTSG communities before. But opposing the existence of these platforms is “misogyny”, apparently.
This is a strawman argument, though. Sure, that can and does happen, but it isn’t the existence of spaces like Tea that is problematic, it is the holistic relationship between men and women in our society, generally. Further, I’m clearly not saying opposing Tea is inherently misogyny. It is a very particular kind of reaction that I am talking about, and you know this.
Tea itself really isn’t any worse than any other forum. You could have the same thing happen to a man on other platforms, there is nothing unique about Tea in that capacity and it is disingenuous to levy that criticism against the platform in isolation. People dislike it because they have a weird caricature of women in their head and assume every person on this app must have been a gossip or an evil person, yet there is no real basis for that claim other than the fact the audience is mainly women. Hence, the “misogyny,” that you seem to not really have the prior life experience to see. You can look through my profile here. I’ve said plenty in support of men’s rights and men’s issues as well, I’m really not rabidly in coalition for a particular gender’s rights or anything. I’m just calling it as I see it and the reaction to Tea on the web is largely sexist.
No one said false accusations aren’t real or that opposing them makes you a misogynist. You’re being intentionally obtuse and conflating a critique of people’s treatment of women in public discourse with a critique of apps such as these generally to make it seem absurd to point out how sexist some of the reaction to Tea has been. Mostly because I think you saw the word “misogyny” thrown out and for some reason took it as a personal insult or something. I think most people would reflect upon that and I’d hope you would too.
I probably won’t further respond because I’m getting the idea honest discourse and dialectic isn’t your goal here.
The app is literally called Tea, as in “spilling the tea.”
I’m all for groups of safe spaces for women. Especially when it’s designed to keep them safe while dating. I have my doubts that Tea was that. Even if it was advertised as such, “tea” is slang for the word gossip. I’ve heard stories from several sources that it was used to dox people as well. Not saying what happened to the users is right. I think some users here are just feeling smug that this might cause the app to fail or shut down.
The app enables the photos to be run through a reverse image search, enabling them to run a basic background check, check against public sex offender databases, and check for photos that might get flagged as being used in “catfishing” — misrepresenting one’s identity online.
The app also features a “Tea Party Group Chat,” which allows users to directly share information about men, and has a rating function, which allows users to share their experiences with Yelp-style reviews, awarding men a “green flag” or a “red flag.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/us/tea-app-dating-privacy-cec
It’s a bit like Rate My Professor, but for dating.
Honestly I cyncially expect this kind of app might inevitably exist for rating people of all genders (or that dating apps might incorporate this Uber-style rating system), but the reason this app exists has directly to do with the violence women face from intimate partners.
The point is that men who are enjoying the doxxing of women who have used this app are ignoring the context, or even have a warped sense of the context, as if this is narrowly about (legitimate) privacy concerns and the harms caused by the app.
Even if the concerns about the app are justified, the revenge enjoyment betrays a view much harder to defend, that all the women who used the app are equally cupable, or that doxxing women using the app is equivalent to women doxxing abusive men through the app.
Men are not all equally privileged, but there is a broad inequality both to how violence is distributed and how that plays out in dating situations. Women are not wrong to fear men. One in three women have experienced sexual or physical violence, most of that violence being perpetuated by men.
Since this is the context for the use of this app, it’s not neutral to doxx its users or to claim it’s fair because men feel (legitimate) concerns about the app’s privacy violations.
I agree 100% that women face many more dangers especially in the dating scene than men. I’m all for having resources available for them to remain as safe as possible.
I don’t see how a Rate My Professor type app would work well for dates. I feel like people would only spend the time to rate poor dates. If you had a really good date with someone, you would presumably start dating them so why would you let everyone else know they are a good person to go out with? I have no doubt there are some awful people out there that others should be warned about, but this type of app is a bit too risky to justify that in my opinion.
The background check feature sounds much more legit, but I don’t think a group chat feature needs to exist along side it.
All that being said, anyone enjoying the doxxing of others is just an asshole. There’s definitely nothing fair about it from either side.
yeah, the app has obvious flaws, and the Rate My Professor style approach succeeds or fails depending on the quality of the users and moderators, and could easily be useless or become toxic - either way, I’m not defending this aspect of the app, it’s clearly problematic.
Regardless I understand why women would want a resource like this, and that doesn’t seem true for those in the comments who see the doxxing as deserved for using this app.
Nevermind the rest of the context, like 4chan being a bastion of right-wing, misogynist trolls who would target an app like this for political reasons.
Lemmy users approving 4chan doxxing women is a major red flag … it might have something to do with how many Lemmy users come here due to being banned for their behavior on Reddit. Reddit isn’t sending their best and brightest, and it shows. (This is just my speculation, though.)
My friend came over and told me a story about this crazy date she was on. The guy love bombs her, sets her up with a massage, then in the morning, goes out and eats McDonalds alone and ghosts her. Then repeats every few weeks with love bombs.
I shared that with my discord group and someone said they know that guy too.
Im assuming that’s what Tea is for.
Wait what? How does one ghost and then repeat love bombing? Also why is eating breakfast alone remarkable? Tf is happening?
I thought 4chan shut down permanently like 2 months ago?
Nah they came back online after like 2 weeks I think?
They found someone to update the PHP version to one released this decade.
Tea is the offshoot of all those “Are We Dating The Same Guy” Facebook groups where ladies gossip, talk shit, slander and creep-shame guys they went on dates with, sometimes throwing around false accusations maliciously to get men ostracized.
On one hand, damn these groups are toxic as fuck and that makes me feel a lot less sympathetic. But on the other hand, this is a textbook argument for why mandatory age verification laws need to be abolished. AWDTSG works as a way to keep women safe when it’s used as intended but there are too many women that will slander men with false allegations purely out of spite.
Right, because only women are the problem, and men are paragons of virtue.
Fuck off
Did I state that? No?
You can fuck off.
This is what happens when you decide to vibecode a service with zero attention to safety or web development. This is why you don’t immediately jump onto a new service without it being vetted properly. Now one of the worst communities on the Internet is in possession of over a hundred thousand women’s driving licenses and faces. This is going to be an absolute disaster.
Now now, I like to shit on vibecoders too but let’s not pretend this is some new problem.
Idiots leave databases on cloud servers exposed all the time rather than deal with their companies often arcane rules for generating certificates
Remember when the government published SSNs in HTML? https://www.zdnet.com/article/missouri-will-not-prosecute-hacker-reporter-for-daring-to-view-state-website-html/
How is something “vetted properly” and how do I find out about that?
I honestly don’t understand what op is talking about.
Leaks happen all the time, even in billion dollar companies.
Their comment is the equivalent like, “This is why you should lock your doors!” Like uh okay.
This was more like leaving all your valuables in a cardboard box on your front lawn. Anyone can just take it, if they care to look inside the complete unsecured box.
Someone just drove up and tossed the box in their truck. No lock involved.
Deutsch ≠ English
Schau mal nach, in welcher Sprache die Wikiseite ist…
I assumed people would be able to find Wikipedia’s “switch language” button and Datensparsamkeit has a better fit here that would be lost in translation.
