#tea app

An app called Tea was shooting up through the App Store this month and causing a huge meltdown among men on both Reddit and X. It asked users for photo or ID verification to prove that they were women and then allowed them to basically post reviews of guys in their area. The app was marketed as a way to protect women from abusers, but, obviously, it spun out of control pretty quickly. As Kate Lindsay in Embedded wrote, “Tea was doomed from the start,” arguing that there was never going to be an app-based solution for this that didn’t devolve into cyberbullying. And Clare Haber-Harris over at Cartoons Hate Her went further, declaring, “No matter who the target is — men, women, or anyone else — apps and sites like this just shouldn’t exist.” And then, over the weekend, all of the users’ personal info leaked.

The Tea app and the future of online surveillance

Bro radical feminism is fucking up women like never before. Influencers make up lies about middle class white women being at risk of being kidnapped at any moment until they'll do anything to "protect themselves" up to and including handing all of their personal info to an unsecured database on a "yelp for men" app leaving them five billion percent more vulnerable to danger than just not letting a statistically unlikely thing control your life 24/7.

Remember, the men you need to worry about are not strangers or people posting flyers for MLM jobs and scams. They're the men closest to you, and this will not fucking protect you from that.

(Also this shit is screaming sex offender registry and I thought we agreed that thing was fucking stupid and increases recidivism and can be applied to queer people who just exist in public forever ruining their lives. What about false flags? This could legit be used by abusive women to isolate their male victims by turning a perfectly normal dude who needs help into a dangerous predator who must be shunned. And I don't even want to imagine the danger something like this poses to disabled and black and other marginalized men, who you should care about. Dumbest shit every that makes everything worse and upholds a dozen kinda of bigotry while helping no one.)

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. In a statement to 404 Media, Tea confirmed the breach also impacted some direct messages but said that the data is from two years ago.

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

Seeing men take this information & say that women deserve to be forced, stalked, harassed & raped, is enough for me to realize that there needs to be a safer app like Tea for women to use, and not to worry about potential data leaks, so creepy fuckers online don't harass women who just want to know who they're dating.

Are there going to be bad actors? Absolutely. But I'd rather listen to a woman who potentially lied about a man, than to end up on the evening news.

There is a strange kind of poetry in seeing Clippy, the cheerful little paperclip from Microsoft Office, become the face of a modern internet protest. Louis Rossmann, well known for his fight against corporate overreach in technology, recently called on people to change their profile pictures to Clippy as an act of quiet resistance. On the surface, it may seem like an odd choice. After all,…

Oh look at that, a company that required face ID to use and insisted it was safe has been hacked, 'leaking' the identity of its users.

Maybe the internet does need to be a 'safer' place but asking users to upload pictures of their face (or worse legal ID) is not going to fix that.

In the early days of the internet (90s and 00s) it felt pretty clear that uploading any personal information was risky at best and dangerous at worst. The rise of internet corporations and social media have eroded that sense of caution I'm sure we used to have. Governments are questionable, but they generally have a greater sense of responsibility and accountability than independent actors. These online businesses should not be trusted with personal information, including your appearance.

Article under cut

and here’s a little tidbit about it from the MRA reddit

I genuinely believe they all know theyre full of shit and play willfully ignorant to the eye since they all are aware theyre lying and in on it together.

they will admit you know itd get taken down but pretend its under the generalized pretense of ‘men not being allowed to have thing’ when they KNOW what theyd do with it if they got their hands on it

also I don’t know why tumblr’s not letting me attach the news article but it’s nbcnews.com : headline “women are anonymously spilling tea about men in their cities on viral app”

a point i neglected to add so I’m editing original post:

IF YOU ARE A VICTIM OF “REVENGE PORN”

there are services created to help you please PLEASE use them! and spread the word to all women — in the usa it is a federal crime- part of the ‘Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act’ of 2022

I’ve been trying to post this link of any conversation surrounding the Tea app and Teaborn