Tea wasn’t hacked. Tea posted these images to a public file sharing site. Tea claimed that they deleted these images after verifying the applicant was a woman but clearly that was a fraudulent claim.

That's corporate social media/apps in general. Does this thing basically let people list crappy things that happened to them by specific humans?

It's basically a slander app, from what I can tell.

Having no experience with the app whatsoever, I can only guess, and I’d guess that it does as you suggest, though there may be varying levels of specificity involved.

it seems its an app that helps women flag potential dating candidates as being dangerous or red flags.

there is the potential for doxxing that comes with that, but I can absolutely understand its use and need when not abused in that manner.

i wonder if there's the potential for a different app with more encryption and a way to prevent doxxing and abuse.

it also lists criminal history that might not be disclosed on a dating profile. and other information that might be a red flag.

Regardless of the actual truth of that information.

indeed. there's the potential for abuse and doxxing. but I think the app could be done in a safe way. and with much less leakery.

How would you implement the app in its current concept, without the possibility for abuse? It seems inherent to the very idea of it.

There's definitely a use case, but there's an inherent power imbalance to these products that makes sure they will always be misused. The submitters are anonymous, and it's up to the person being reported on to prove the accusations are false.

Or, they're supposed to be anonymous.

How do you warn people about a potential dating candidate being dangerous without doxxing the potential dating candidate? "Hey, watch out for [anonymous person]" doesn't sound very useful.

Fair point.

Yeah, the entire point of the app is that you go there and talk about the bad things a person has done.

That seems pretty hard to identify them without posting their image without their consent and discussing private details of their life so others can identify them. It is creepy as hell, at a minimum.

Change the target to any other group and the outrage would be 100-10000 fold bigger.

Try it out, instead of Women rating men, try subbing in various minority groups or races.

Bonus points for the most offensive combinations.....

e.g. Russians rating Ukrainians in your area....it can get pretty bad...I can think of many worse combos.

Russians rating Ukrainians

Interesting analogy. You realize you have it backwards, right? Women are the Ukrainians on this scenario.

Agreed, but it is worse the way I put it...

Tea was storing its users’ sensitive information on Firebase, a Google-owned backend cloud storage and computing service.

Every time. With startups, it's always an unsecured Firebase or S3 bucket.

So, like the Chinese national merit system? That's super fair and nothing ever goes wrong.

the what? i am not familiar with that.