Tea, an app where women talk about the men they are dating, suffered a major security breach on Friday, resulting in 72,000 selfies, ID photos, and other user images being exposed. Social media users have flooded platforms with unflattering images of women who use the app to critique the men in their life.
The app, which has surged in downloads over the past week, “identified unauthorized access to our systems” that exposed thousands of user images, the company confirmed in a Friday statement.
Tea went on to reveal that its “legacy data storage system was compromised,” resulting in unauthorized access to a collection of data meant for organizing or storing information for analysis or processing for the app.
The breach involved access to approximately 72,000 images, which included about 13,000 selfies and photo identification that women submitted during account verification, and roughly 59,000 images that were publicly available within the app from posts, comments, and direct messages, the company said of its preliminary findings.
Given that Tea is meant to be a woman-only platform, the app requires users to verify they are female by uploading a selfie or photo ID before being added to the waiting list pending approval, which has an estimated wait time of 17 hours as of Monday morning.
“I thought the selfies were deleted?” read one query listed in the company’s list of Frequently Asked Questions, to which the app replied by admitting the photos were actually archived, citing “law enforcement requirements related to cyber-bullying prevention.”
“At this time, we have no evidence to suggest that photos can be linked to specific users within the app,” the company added.
But for Tea Dating Advice users, it doesn’t matter, as the leaked photos still made their way to social media, where the women were mercilessly roasted.
“The men who were posted on the Tea app versus the women that posted them,” one X user quipped, sharing two photos, one featuring a collage of the men who were posted, with the other showing unflattering photos of the women gossiping about them on the app.
“This is who’s calling you an incel on the Tea App,” another X user wrote, sharing four unfavorable photos of women sans makeup.
“Someone created a website where you can rate the users of the hacked feminist doxing app ‘Tea,’” a third revealed, before asking, “Is this the most chopped userbase of all time?”
While email addresses and phone numbers were not included in the data breach, “We are currently working to determine the full nature and scope of information involved in the incident,” Tea said on Friday of its security breach.
The creation of Tea appears to have been inspired by the popular Facebook groups known as “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” (AWDTSG), which exist for virtually every major city in the United States.
But the app promises its users that their experience will be “even BETTER” than the AWDTSG Facebook groups, where women post the photos and names of the men they are dating, seeking information from other women in their area who may have previously dated or are currently dating them.
“It’s like a big chat with all the girlies in the U.S. making sure we’re not dating the same guy,” the company said in an Instagram post last month.
When signing up for the app, a new user is immediately told, “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,” and “you can set alerts for a man’s name.”
Trying to take a screenshot or screen recording within the app results in the saved image or video displaying as just a black screen on a user’s phone.
Users who sign up for Tea are also informed that they will be able to “run background checks, check criminal records, search for sex offenders, look up phone numbers, reverse image searches,” and “find social media profiles” relating to the men they are dating.
Tea Dating Advice’s data breach notably transpired after the app reached number one in U.S. downloads on Apple’s App Store last week, which resulted in the platform receiving major attention, as well as backlash over questions about whether the company’s practices violates men’s privacy.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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