WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The women-only U.S. dating advice app Tea has suspended direct messaging following a series of security breaches that exposed its users’ personal details and sensitive communications, the company said on Tuesday.
In a series of posts to TikTok, Tea Dating Advice said it had taken messaging offline “out of an abundance of caution” after discovering the breach. The announcement followed a report last week in tech publication 404media that the company had inadvertently exposed the names, selfies, and identity documents of thousands of women, and a second report earlier on Tuesday that direct messages – including sensitive conversations around abortions and infidelity – had similarly been exposed.
The app – which boasts 4.6 million users – is pitched as a “dating safety platform” that women can use to steer clear of men who are adulterous, dishonest, or worse. As a TikTok video put out by the company last year put it, the app “makes the FBI work for us girlies so much easier.”
Women on Tea are encouraged to share details about prospective dates, create alerts against men’s names, and put red flags against men who are alleged to be unscrupulous and green flags against those who are not. “Everything is anonymous,” the app promises users on sign-up. Reuters could not establish why the selfies and ID card data had lingered online.
Tea did not respond to requests seeking further comment. In its TikTok message, the app said the FBI was investigating the circumstances around the breach. The FBI declined to comment.
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the premise behind the app – creating a kind of massive whisper network powered by anonymous users – was already “a little bit sketchy.” She said the app’s makers had made it worse by being “honestly negligent” about their security and that the disaster was compounded because “women are encouraged to share extremely sensitive information about themselves and others.”
(Reporting by Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
