It would be interesting to see something similar that required accusations to be backed up with evidence. Police reports, court proceedings and results, news articles etc.

It would also be a lot safer, legally speaking, for the service provider.

I have the solution. Nobody's gonna like it, everybody here is gonna scream at me about it, but I have the solution.

Stop dating strangers on the internet.

The entire personals site/dating app experiment we've been running for the last quarter century is obviously a categorical failure. Humans just don't work like this.

Things have gotten so much worse since I was in high school. When I was in high school, the community of girls available to me to ask out were pretty much all girls I'd known since we were 5. A lot of them, I didn't have to wonder about their character, their intentions, their capacity to do harm, I was there when all that was written. I remember how much of a bully Chelsea was in middle school, I remember how nice Ashley was to everyone, I remember how Justine seemed weirdly infatuated with me in the 4th grade. They'd all remember stuff about me and the other boys. We graduated high school, I never saw 80% of them ever again, and within 5 years that figure climbed to at least 95%. Four years of college with mostly abject strangers who you're weirdly fast to form and break deceptively deep bonds with, all of whom I've also lost track of, and then the adult world in which everyone including you is an NPC.

I happen to be the exact age where, I got out of college in 2007, I disappeared into work, like I went to the airport and I went home for two years. In 2009, I looked back up and everything had CHANGED. Instant messaging was on smart phones now, and you WERE NOT TO approach women in person, only through phone-based dating apps and you had BETTER FUCKING NOT already be acquainted.

Don't talk to women at the grocery store. Don't talk to women at the gym. Don't talk to women at the library. Don't talk to women at your work. Don't talk to women at their work. Don't talk to women at the coffee shop. Don't talk to women at the bar. Don't talk to women at the club. Don't talk to women. No woman, only app.

How do you meet more women? Oh that's categorically the wrong question because having the goal of meeting women in the first place is creepy. Stop wanting to meet women and instead organically decide you want to do things that women happen to like, and then accidentally meet women in the course of doing those things. You know, at those meetups that are always happening on a recurring basis, that aren't advertised to happen at a place and time and then no one shows up and the listing is never re-posted. Probably just install more apps.

It's been women driving this, men vastly prefer asking women out from within their social circle. The pressure to make the first move is still on men, and he'd rather ask out women he already thinks he might like. Women on the other hand vastly prefer to be cold approached by a charming stranger.

I think it's gone far enough when we've got women saying dumb shit like "Systematically doxxing and libeling men is a risk we're just going to have to take."

Encrypting the transmission doesn't do much if every app installation contains access credentials that can be extracted or sniffed.

Encrypt the credentials then? Or OAUTH pipeline, perhaps? Automated temporary private key generation for each upload (that sounds unrealistic, to be fair)? Can credentialing be used for intermediary storage that encrypts the data on that server and then decrypted on the database host?

Clearly my utter "noobishness" is showing, but at least it's triggering a slight urge to casually peruse modern WebSec production workflows. I am a DNN researcher. Thus, I am far removed from customer-facing production environments, and it shows.

Any recommendations on literature or articles on how engineers solve these problems in a "best practices" way that you can recommend? I suppose I could just look it up, but I thought I'd ask.

Edit: I don't know why I'm down-voted. My questions were sincere.

Wouldn't some sort of proxy in between the bucket and the client app solve this problem? I feel like you could even set up an endpoint on your backend that manages the upload. In other words, why is it necessary for the client app to connect directly with the bucket?

Maybe I'm not understanding the gist of the problem

My hey we’re probably using Firestore as their database without authenticating their api calls to firebase functions. Basically leaving their api endpoints open to the public Internet.

They could have connected service account and used some kind of auth handshake between that and generate a temporary login token based on user credentials and the service account oauth credentials to access the api. but they probably just had everything set to unauthenticated

Defaming people without giving them a chance to defend themselves, talk about shit people...

You've got the right ideas. Noone should ever be storing any password in plaintext. It should always be hashed and only the hash stored. That's like WEBDEV99 (remedial course, not even 101).

Really. Despite your stated "noobishness", you basically landed in the territory of best practices right of the bat.

If you're looking for a good source of best practices, the CIS benchmarks are great. https://www.cisecurity.org/

I think of the "bad" dates I would want to be able to warn other women of that didn't rise to the level of calling the cops. The guy who ordered triple the food and drinks I did and skipped out on the bill. The guy who flat out lied about multiple things and then got irate when I politely excused myself from the date. The MAGA weirdo who went on an unhinged rant about how I needed to submit to him because God said so. I imagine some men have comparable experiences with some anti-social women. The experiences coming to mind were not illegal, but were absolutely things I want to spare my fellow humans from.

I would prefer the dating apps themselves have some mechanism for disincentivizing anti-social behaviors. It would have to be more than a simple 5-star rating.

I wonder how it would work IRL to offer the ability to write a few sentences in response to prompts about a date. The written review is not published as-is, but is used in grouping of many reviews to give a summary about a person. Like the summary product reviews on Amazon now. "Bill's dates found he was prompt and polite. Some dates expressed discomfort at some of his political views" and "Bob's dates warn he is often late and is quick to use foul language to describe women. Multiple dates report no intention to communicate with Bob further". "Ben's dates report he has skipped out on the bill repeatedly, and sends unsolicited dick pics. Multiple dates have blocked him".

The group summary gives a buffer so the person reviewed doesn't know which specific date said what. And ensures the summary doesn't include negative comments about a person unless multiple dates of theirs independently report similar experiences.

Of course a bad actor could ditch their dating profile and start fresh any time they build up enough negative reviews to make their summary look bad. And of course the reviews and the summaries would have to be secured tighter than "Tea" is.

I feel that the app filled a need of women we should not ignore. But the app, both this specific app and also the overall concept, is just too rife with downsides to be workable.

So we, as men and as society need to reevaluate why women feel the need for such an app, and reinvest in the criminal justice system to hold victimizers more accountable.

It’s okay to call this app and similar Facebook groups unacceptable. But that’s not enough, we must also call for stronger protections for victims of criminal behavior.

Wouldn't some sort of proxy in between the bucket and the client app solve this problem? I feel like you could even set up an endpoint on your backend that manages the upload. In other words, why is it necessary for the client app to connect directly with the bucket?

Maybe I'm not understanding the gist of the problem

On one hand, yes. On the other, women have, based upon crime statistics, legitimate reasons to avoid putting themselves in a situation where they may be assaulted or murdered for reporting problematic and/or worrisome behavior.

Good lord, please tell me you did not just use ted bundy to describe what you think women like in men?

also did you just lore dump to a complete stranger? we're having a casual conversation.

i never said anything as insane as "Systematically doxxing and libeling men is a risk we're just going to have to take". i said doxxing should be avoided, if you'd read any of my comments.

who is this long winded comment for, exactly?

A lot of people have speculated that.

According to their statement their code was written in Feb/2024 and predates "vibe coding"

I don't think creating an incel style circlejerk is the best solution.

please tell me you did not just use ted bundy to describe what you think women like in men?

I did, because he was. Two different ways.

1. Bundy's modus operandi was to approach women in public as a handsome, charming stranger. I'm pretty sure women like handsome, charming strangers; the entire female dating strategy seems to be geared toward attracting handsome, charming strangers. Ted Bundy was able to attract dozens of victims like that. There's an inherent danger in attracting strangers, because sometimes strangers are psychopaths.

2. Ted Bundy got a LOT of fan mail from women while he was in prison. Love letters, marriage proposals, nude photos. A shocking number of women saw his picture on the news alongside words like "murder trial" and "death sentence" and said "That's the man for me." He pulled some weird stunt to "get married" and he fathered a child from prison. This isn't unique to Ted Bundy, lots of mass murderers and serial killers have groupies, from Charles Manson to Dylan Klebold.

i said doxxing should be avoided, if you’d read any of my comments.

You came across as pretty lukewarm to me. "Yeah doxxing is a problem I guess." You can't have a Don't Date Him Girl website without doxxing. Doxxing is how they work.

I feel that the app filled a need of women we should not ignore. But the app, both this specific app and also the overall concept, is just too rife with downsides to be workable.

So we, as men and as society need to reevaluate why women feel the need for such an app, and reinvest in the criminal justice system to hold victimizers more accountable.

It’s okay to call this app and similar Facebook groups unacceptable. But that’s not enough, we must also call for stronger protections for victims of criminal behavior.

Yup. It sounds like they were following security worst practices.

I think there must be a way to deliver on the value of the app without it being the privacy/public exposure nightmare it sounds like. Speaking naively, perhaps a setup where you can only speak about a person with those who have actually matched with them.