Tea Dating Advice Investigation
Background
Tea Dating Advice (“Tea Dating”) is an app created in 2023 to serve women using dating apps. Tea sought to give women the ability to vet the men they find on dating apps. Women are able to post feedback and information about men across different dating apps and subsequent women may review that feedback for red flags. The Tea Dating app is only for women, and men are not allowed to join. To enforce this rule, the app verifies whether the people signing up for Tea Dating are women. For a time, Tea Dating required users to upload a photo of the user’s driver’s license, though it later only required photos.
What Happened
Recently, actors posting on the site 4chan announced they had discovered a database related to the Tea Dating app including photos of users’ driver’s licenses and other information. This information was quickly spread on the internet. Tea Dating has confirmed this incident. The database was hosted on Google’s Firebase platform owned by Tea Dating. The company claims to have more than 1.6 million users, and some reports show tens of thousands of users’ data were exposed. Given how the data was stored, Tea Dating failed to utilize reasonable security measures to ensure its users’ personal data was safe. Tea Dating asked for and received users’ personal information, including drivers license numbers, as a condition to using Tea Dating’s platform.
Users Face New Harms
The users who have had data exposed from the Tea Dating disclosure face a heightened risk of fraud and identify theft, but also a very real risk of retaliation. Tea knew, or should have known, that the men identified on its platform would seek both the content posted on the app as well as the identities of the women posting that content. This may increase the users’ risk of retaliation, dating violence, and fraud.
Victims of this disclosure face many kinds of injuries including but not limited to identity theft, spam, credit fraud, loss of control of their information, and lost time spent trying to get the information removed from publicly accessible places.
If you registered for the Tea Dating Advice app anytime since 2023, your information may have been made public as a result of Tea Dating’s failures to safeguard your data. Please fill out the form below immediately to learn more about your rights.
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