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What just happened? Tea, officially known as "Tea Dating Advice," is a dating safety app that allows women to anonymously share information about men and potential red flag behavior. Now the top free app in the App Store, Tea has been hacked. 4Chan users linked to a public storage bucket containing about 72,000 images, including 13,000 selfies and government-issued IDs used for gender verification.
The Tea app has seen a surge in popularity recently. Founded in 2023, it allows women to exchange details about local men in the area. This can be anything from behavior that could be perceived as warning signs, whether they are married, are registered sex offenders, have criminal records, or if they use fake images for catfishing.
Women can also share "green flag" qualities found in men.
Tea recently said that it has over 4 million members globally and became the top free app in Apple's App Store last week. But while it is advertised as being a safety app, it has received plenty of criticism. Some men claim to have been doxxed or misrepresented by women with a grudge. Others say it is "anti-male."
The app requires users to take selfies to prove they are female. Tea's privacy policy states that these photos are "deleted immediately" after authentication.
404 Media reports that 4Chan users posted links to an exposed cloud database hosted on Google's mobile app development platform, Firebase. This followed calls on the site for a "hack and leak" campaign against the app.
Members of the imageboard reportedly searched through the data, posting selfies and identities that had been uploaded to Tea. One person said they downloaded 3,000 images.
Although screenshots from the app are blocked by its security features, Tea admitted that 59,000 images showing posts, comments, and direct messages from over two years ago were also accessed.
404 Media reports that the public bucket linked by 4Chan users was the same one the publication discovered in the app's source code.
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