Update, 7/28: Over the weekend, the Tea app announced it had suffered a data breach, and hackers had accessed roughly 72,000 images, including 13,000 selfies submitted for account verification and 59,000 images from posts, comments and direct messages. No emails or phone numbers were exposed, according to the app’s statement, and only users who signed up before February 2024 were affected.
If you had an opportunity to prevent yourself from possible future harm — say, going on a first date with someone who’s secretly a serial cheater or pathological liar — would you take it? If only someone was there to warn you ahead of time what you’d be getting into. Would you listen, even if it was from another random person online?
That’s basically the premise of the Tea app. It ranked as the top free app in Apple’s App Store — it’s currently second behind ChatGPT — and it’s all about helping women avoid major red flags before going on dates with men, like making sure a date is “safe, not a catfish, and not in a relationship,” according to its description. Through anonymous accounts — created after a verification process — women can post their dating experiences with men along with their name and photo, which can be accessed by other users by simply searching the name of their date within the app.
“PSA to all my green flag men out there,” a man says in this video posted by Tea’s Instagram account, “you should encourage the women you’re talking to online to do a background check on you before you ever meet up.”
I signed up to join the app last Friday and haven’t been verified yet, though their statements in response to the data breach said that acceptances will be delayed as they now have 2.5 million requests to vet. The process was relatively simple. Once I started the registration process, I was brought to a page called “How Tea Works,” which listed out several rules that, verbatim, said this:
- Everything is anonymous
- Screenshots are impossible
- All women are verified
- You can access all posts across the entire nation
- You can search all posts in the country by a man’s name
- You can set alerts for a man’s name
- We donate 10% to the national domestic violence hotline
It was all incredibly transparent, which definitely made me feel like there was some pretty legit vetting going on. I was then brought to a page called “Our Safety Tools,” which laid it all out:
- Run background checks
- Check criminal records
- Search for sex offenders
- Look up phone numbers
- Reverse image search
- Find social media profiles
For one, this isn’t the first forum like this in existence. Similar kinds of specific city-based pages called “Are We Dating The Same Guy?” have become quite popular on Facebook. The New York City and Los Angeles ones started in 2022, and since then, over 200 other city-specific ones have popped up.
During the verification process, I was asked to put in an anonymous screen name, my birthday and a selfie. As of Wednesday, there were 13,462 requests ahead of me, giving me an estimated acceptance wait time of 72 hours. But this was before the breach.
On Thursday evening, a message thread between users on the anonymous forum website 4Chan broke out, calling for a “hack and leak” campaign. This news was broke by 404media. On Friday morning, a user posted a link to an exposed database that stored all the compromised personal data. The Tea app posted a statement on Friday to its social media alerting users, and it posted an updated one yesterday.
“This is why we created Tea: so that women could not only have a voice, but so that it could be heard, amplified, and supported,” the post says. “Thank you for sticking with us during this time — we exist to empower women and give them access to high-impacting dating safety tools.”
Once a user is accepted, they have the ability to “green flag” and “red flag” a person, evaluating their rating on whether or not he’s an eligible bachelor or someone not worth the potential heartache or safety risk.
Before the data breach, the public perception of Tea had been quite…mixed. Some women seemed excited about a promising space to keep others safe, but others have larger concerns about privacy and safety — which has been proven warranted, apparently, but not necessarily in the way that a lot of people thought. Since men aren’t able to see what’s being said about them, they have no way to vouch or defend themselves, opening pathways to harassment or doxing toward these men. Especially considering that anyone who has an account can chime in, which means there’s no way to tell if users have even come in contact with the people they’re commenting about. There’s also no verification process for the comments being made, which means some accusations could be false or misconstrued. Now, some women are left feeling distrust toward the app, as identifying information that was promised to be deleted after used for verification was compromised.
Clearly, there are also a lot of men who are feeling a lot of anger toward Tea and its users, some even calling for a male-only app that’ll allow them to basically do the same thing to women. One app called Teaborn with this functionality made its way to the App Store, according to NBC, but it was eventually removed from the store.
Ultimately, there’s a lot of gray area for harm — and even possible cases of defamation. A Los Angeles man tried to sue 10 women for defamation last year after alleged false posts and comments were made in an “Are We Dating The Same Guy?” Facebook page. A man in Chicago also filed a lawsuit alleging defamation and invasion of privacy last year for comments also made on an “Are We Dating The Same Guy?” Facebook page. Both of these cases were dismissed by judges.
There is a takedown process available on Tea — those affected must reach out to a specific email and provide as much context as possible for the situation, as well as a photo of themselves.
So, could something like this still even work? We can acknowledge there’s some risk involved here. If you’re a man who hasn’t done anything wrong, then in theory, you probably have nothing to worry about. But there’s still a chance someone’s image could be unfairly tainted, depending on who it is and what the story there is. Sure, maybe a guy ghosted someone after a few dates a year ago, which of course sucks. Maybe there was a valid reason why he did, and maybe the guy realized it was wrong and if asked about it now, he’d acknowledge it and show he’s changed.
And if Tea becomes a pile of false accusations, it defeats the entire purpose. Women need to be able to use it intentionally, as a valuable resource and not a place to get revenge or cause controversy for no reason.
There’s also the fact that the app is being misused in other ways. For example: Despite the app not allowing screenshots, it hasn’t prevented people from finding a way to post the profiles and what people are saying on social media. This completely eliminates the secrecy of it all, as problematic men can then see themselves on there just by scrolling social media and could potentially realize they’re being called out for some bad behavior. And if it’s a pretty serious accusation, it puts people he’s been in previous relationships with at risk for retaliation. It could impact future partners as well — Lia Holland, a campaigns & communications director for Fight for the Future, told Business Insider that a true predator could use the app for positive reviews but still lure in an unsuspecting partner. That’s a terrifying reality for women to have to consider — on top of all the other concerns that are the reason Tea even exists.
Given the existence of 200 similar Facebook pages garnering thousands of members over the past few years, it’s clear that women feel a sense of alarm when it comes to dating men. It’s a topic that’s constantly written about: Women are incredibly tired of dating men. An app like this — if used with true intentions under safe, protecting parameters — can still exist as a safe space for women to vulnerably discuss their experiences and hold men accountable by alerting potential future partners.
The remaining question is whether or not the concerns here, especially given the data breach, still really outweigh the potential benefits. My answer is yes. I was understanding of the mixed concerns here at first, but there’s something painfully ironic about this entire situation: Of course some men were so threatened by an app like this existing that they had to find a way to expose women sharing their experiences. We can’t have one nice thing, can we?
If anything, the data breach personally shows me how badly women need an app like this. Women need a safe outlet where they can trust each other and help each other avoid messy situations ahead of time. According to a SUNY Oswego survey, over 57% of rapes happen after dates. One in three women also experience rape, physical violence or stalking by a partner in their lifetime. Men who know the statistics and care about the wellbeing of their female partners should ideally encourage and understand thorough searching and safety vetting. Men who are inconsolably angry about Tea clearly have something to hide.
Like all things that are new, it surely has some kinks to work out. But with time, trialing and more concrete guidelines surrounding privacy, data and false accusation concerns, who’s to say it couldn’t work? A man still, probably.
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