Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media.
The Tea app is agnostic. While its purpose and main use case was made for the safety of women in the dating scene, it was inevitably used to spread exaggerated or misleading information about otherwise innocent men. Imagine being a privacy-conscious individual, and breaking up with a toxic woman. She could go on to spread lies about you and even upload pictures of you to the reverse image search/ai. So even if you were doing everything right from a privacy standpoint, you’d still end up in someone’s private database, subjected to ai training, shared with the government, or who knows what. While I do see the purpose of apps like these, they can effectively take away someone’s privacy/dignity without them even knowing about it. Now imagine being a 4channer, someone probably even more privacy-conscious than lemmings, and possibly experiencing mental disorders like paranoid schizophrenia or autism; of course they’re drawn to hacking an app that would destroy their privacy. They are not sane individuals, so this event really was inevitable.