Is this even legal? Answers to every question about the Tea app drama
Tea Dating Advice is an app that has quietly existed since 2023 — but it rocketed to the top of Apple’s app store this week after getting a ton of attention on social media. Since the start of the week, the app maker says, something like a million new users have signed up.
Tea is marketed as a “dating safety tool” for women, and it pledges to donate ten percent of its revenue to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. How does it achieve safety? By letting users post photos and gather information about potential suitors.
Many men online saw the point of how the app might protect women, but a number of people expressed worry about the fairness and the legality of it all, ranging from the philosophical to the personal. “The risk of abuse is insanely insanely high,” said one Redditor in a discussion on /privacy. “It seems pretty socially deleterious if any human can have a social media profile they can’t view created for them without their consent or knowledge,” one Twitter user wrote. And, of course: “They got me fellas,” one man posted on TikTok, showing what appeared to be a report about him on the app. (“Welp time to move,” he concluded.)
Then, on July 25, 4chan users claimed they found a database related to the app that included photos of users’ IDs and other information, adding more fuel to the privacy fire. (The company confirmed the breach to 404 Media.) So what’s the legal tea?
