https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/tea-app-brea...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/tea-app-brea...
Drivers licenses can be faked. Moreover, someone can just pretend to be someone else on this app with real drivers licenses.
The whole premise, implementation and process of Tea as a social media app is flawed, and a legal liability for the devs.
The internet went from 'YouTube asking users to never use your real name' to 'you have to submit your ID to some random app' in 10 years. Crazy!
This absolutely should not be normalized. If I'm ever prompted to submit photos of a government ID to some service, I'm turning heel. I'll try to use their phone service (which I just did successfully this week), correspond via mail or maybe, as you've said, handle it in person but I'm probably content to go without.
It wasn't "normies" so much as it was the leadership and early investors of Facebook shoving "just trust us" and FOMO literally everywhere online. The hype (and hope) in 2010 was REAL and almost all privacy related conversations were shut down on sight. Heck, I think I still have my copy of Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts (ISBN13 9781451636352) somewhere in my closet. Amazing read if you really want to understand the mindset in place at the time.
My driver's license is scanned every time I buy beer. I'm under no illusions that it's not quite readily available in any number of leaks or disclosures.
If that sounds defeatist, maybe it is. Nothing online is private. Once it's in a database, it's only a matter of time before it's exposed. History has proven this again and again.
If they have a problem with it then I will gradually remove pieces until they’re okay. But I haven’t had to do this the few times I’ve used this tactic – it causes issues with automated scans but eventually some human manually reviews it and says it’s okay.
What I don’t like is the “live verification” apps that leave me no choice but to take a photo of it.
That's becoming the norm now, presumably because of concern that people are taking leaked scans from one site, and using it to commit identify fraud (eg. getting KYC scans from crypto exchanges and using it to apply for accounts at other crypto changes, for money laundering purposes).
Because we couldn't get anyone to take the internet seriously if it was just a bunch of anonymous pseudonyms trolling each other. And maybe that was a mistake.
Just look at Facebook. Users with real names sharing all kinds of inane schizo nonsense, extremism, building echo chambers without realizing it, becoming completely divorced from reality as perceived by the majority of people around them in meatspace, because they section themselves off in cyberspace.
It's the only way they will push companies to STOP storing them long term.
I've been in several companies (mostly FinTech) that store personal sensitive documents "just in case". They should be used for whatever is needed and deleted. But lazy compliance and operations VPs would push to keep them... or worse, the marketing people
These are actually still very hard to do. I don't know anyone who would let me use their license for this purpose.
Two people, in public.
Freewalled
I linked the plain HTTP version... which seems to rely on a series of redirects; potentially TOR:
~ $ curl -vLsq http://archive.today/U5Tah |& grep -Ei 'location:|title'
< Location: https://archive.today/U5Tah
< onion-location: http://archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion/U5Tah
< location: https://archive.ph/U5Tah
<title>archive.ph</title>
They don't seem to value privacy.
Ideally you'd see fines in the 10%s of revenue. In egregious cases (gross negligence) like this, you should be able to go outside the LLC and recoup from equity holders' personal assets.
Alas, if only we had consumer protections.
And some kind of legal penalty for the engineers as well. Just fining the company does nothing to change the behavior of the people who built it in the first place.
Joining in with some other comments on this thread, if the stamp of a certified person was required to submit/sign apps with more than 10K or 100K users and came with personal risk and potential loss of licensure, I imagine things would change quickly.
I'm personally not for introducing more gatekeeping and control over software distribution (Apple/Google already have too much power). Also not sure how you'd make it work in an international context, but would be simple to implement for US based companies if Apple/Google wanted to tackle the problem.
I think the broader issue is that we as a society don't see data exposure or bad development practices as real harm. However, exposing the addresses and personal info of people talking about potentially violent, aggressive or unsafe people seems very dangerous.
https://www.teaforwomen.com/about >With a proven background leading product development teams at top Bay Area tech companies like Salesforce and Shutterfly, Sean [Cook, creator of Tea] leveraged his expertise building innovative technology to create a game-changing platform that prioritizes women’s safety
If you're lucky, a clown vibe coded this trash. If you're unlucky, he paid someone to do so, and despite his proven background about leading top Bay Area companies, didn't even think to check a single time.
The CEO is directly responsible for this.
> With a proven background leading product development teams at top Bay Area tech companies like Salesforce and Shutterfly, Sean [Cook, creator of Tea] leveraged his expertise building innovative technology
Blah blah blah blah blah... Just goes to show that you can write all sorts of powerful sounding words about yourself on your About page, but it doesn't say anything about your actual competence. I mean, I don't have a "proven background leading product development teams" but I sure as shit wouldn't make obvious amateur-level mistakes like this if I ever did a startup.
A somewhat embarrassing but relevant example: my friends and I used Grindr for years (many still do), and we remained loyal despite the company's terrible track record with user data, privacy, and security as there simply wasn't (and still isn't) a viable alternative offering the same service at the expected level.
It appears Tea saw a pretty large pop in discussion across social channels over the last few days so I'm pretty hopeful this will lend itself to widespread discussion where the users can understand just how poorly this reflects on the company and determine if they want to stick around or jump ship.
The GDPR in Europe attempts to reset this but it’s still an uphill battle
That cuts to the issue some other comments have pointed out, that user trust is really their most important capital – and with short attention spans and short news cycles, it may rebound surprisingly fast.
There would be a morbid irony in the idea of a tool marketed as increasing safety for women actually being a honeypot operation to accumulate very sensitive personal information on those very women.
How was this app going to monetize?
I'm guessing by selling user data, namely drivers license info to phone number.
Ugh. I’m clearly getting old. I don’t even remember the last time I went to 4chan.
But yeah please tell me how "we care about your privacy"
I mean, it's fun to throw baseless accusations around, but do you have any actual reason to suspect this?
At the very least, the app itself might be legal using the "public forum" argument but the content posted on there definitely leaves the users in a legal gray area.
I can see the argument on both sides but this is asking for a case to be brought just so the law can be fleshed out.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Apple had no issue mass censoring Parlor and others, how is an app like this able to reach #1 under all?
"Don't let Toyota's 'reliable car at a reasonable price' marketing fool you, they're all about money." Yeah, but does that preclude them from selling me an actually reliable car at a reasonable price?
If Toyota says that we're the car company that cares about you, we want to keep you safe from the bad actors, and trust us on making right choices for you - and when you discover Toyota has been secretly building out an ad network, in bed with Chinese government, you have to call them out. And that's what Apple is doing.
Privacy is a human right, except in China where they are happy to go along with what the government wants. Google atleast had the balls to pack up and leave the country.
https://www.bet.com/article/pe65fc/apple-s-black-diversity-c...
Truth.
How is Tea even legal? Isn't this just a legal libel timebomb waiting to happen?
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Defamation is still not protected, it's just the person who posted it who is liable. Meanwhile the site's "editorial control" is protected by the first amendment, not section 230.
To me this feels as if people widely thought that the Apollo Program was intended to prevent people from traveling to the moon, or Magna Carta was meant to prevent barons from limiting the king's power, or Impressionism was all about using technical artistic skills to depict scenes in a realistically detailed way.
A narrowing of section 230 would not be good for Apple or Google, though they wouldn’t face any liability for the Tea apps conduct.
It gets shut down, everyone forgets, then someone eventually has a brilliant idea...
It come from a place of sincerity but defenders imagine everyone would use it for the same reasons they would: Warning people of genuine threats in the dating world. They would never use it for gossip, or revenge, or creative writing, etc. so they don't imagine others would.
But at scale, if generously only 0.1% of women in America are bad actors that would weaponize this app, that's over 150k people (not to mention men slipping past security). And the thing about bad actors is that one bad actor can have an outsized effect.
The problem is the demand is there for such groups and I see posts that range from, “this guy tried to get me to get in his car”, or “man exposed himself to me”, to “man has twice approached children at my child’s school” or “I was drugged and raped after meeting with X on Y dating app”.
Lots of sexual attackers are known to multiple women.
Fact is that in lots of countries rape kits don’t get processed, it’s hard to secure a conviction, many serial sex offenders walk free and many women don’t want to go through a reliving of their trauma in court.
As a result these kinds of groups are very useful, not just for women who are actively dating, but for women who are simply existing in day-to-day public life. We have a president and a supreme court judge who both have been accused of serious sex offenses and nothing happened.
Is there a chance that some man who has done nothing wrong, gets accused by a woman in these groups? Yes of course there is a chance that could happen, but many would prefer to not take the risk of dating someone that has been accused of being a sex offender and the vast majority of posts with confirmation by multiple women confirm that bias.
These groups help keep women safer than without them. There’s a good reason why many women just don’t date at all any more. Covid lockdowns reminded them that they don’t really need it and it’s more hassle than it’s worth.
Sadly the vast majority of men are fine (not all men), but not enough call out the bad and dangerous behavior of a minority of their friends and peers. Until that happens women will be drawn to these apps and groups to try to be safer and not be a part of a sex crime statistic.
The concern of false accusation appears to be... brushed aside. Are you a man? How would you feel if you were falsely accused? Knowing that this could snowball into being doxxed, having your employer informed etc. Innocent men have been jailed for this.
The claim that it provides safety really is just that, an empty claim.
A better way would have been to charge a small subscription fee - like $2/month or something. The fee filters out 99% of the trolls out there (who wants to pay to troll) and also gives the app/website admins access to billing info - name, mailing address, phone number, etc - without the need for a full ID scan. So the tiny amount of trolls that do pay to troll would have to enter accurate deanonymizing payment information to even get on the system in the first place.
And it can be made so only admins know peoples' true identities. For the user facing parts, pseudonyms and usernames are still very possible - again so long as everyone understands up front that such a platform would ultimately not be anonymous on the back end.
But oh no, that won't hypergrow the company and dominate the internet! Think of all the people in India and China you're missing out on! /sarcasm
While the above statement would benefit from adding the word "Some" to the start, I'm not sure it would generate much outcry.
Women aren't evaluated on their income like men are, they are evaluated on their looks. An equivalent app would be something that lets men share if women are less attractive than their pictures.
Thinking every man is a predator is a great way to mostly meet male predators and wind up alone.
On app dates, it's extremely obvious when the person you're sitting down with has the "every man is a predator" attitude. Being treated like that isn't fun. Then a lot of people wonder why all their dates fail or go nowhere or why they can't move outside the app.
That's Pure. And they have more than 5$ I believe.
It is not, indeed.
The first part is its goal: identity is secondary, the main purpose is money. It means a customer can put a fake name and address as long as the money part is considered OK. Most PSPs won't check the cardholder name (it can be used for fuzzy scoring, but exact match is a fool's errand). Address is usually only required for physical goods and won't be checked otherwise. And 3DSecure will shift the blame enough that the PSP won't need to care that much about the details.
The second part is the whole mess that comes with payments. You'll become a card testing pot in no time, and you'll be dealing with all the fuss just to check identities, you'll soon be rising the token payment to a significant amount to cover the costs, and before you realize it half your business has shifted into payment handling.
This is incorrect. The parent acts like it isn't trivial to obtain payment methods that aren't linked to the payer. It seems like a reasonable possibility.
For whom? For people willing to be an asshole on the internet? For people willing to stalk other people online? This sounds exactly like the group of people that would look for ways of paying for something in ways not linked to them, even if that means "borrowing" someone else's identity
The only reason I haven't is because it feels like LinkedIn may have already jumped the shark and I wouldn't really get the value for my money.
The issue is they decided to roll their own extremely questionable service and insecurely store sensitive images in a public bucket
Multiple SAAS vendors provide ID verification for ~$2/each. They should have eaten that fee when it was small and then found a way pass it onto the users later
Have you seen who has the blue checkmarks on Twitter/X now? I'll give you a hint, it's not the people who argue in good faith.
You've never visited X (formerly known as Twitter)?
By this logic: I suppose glassdoor, yelp, or Google reviews aren't legal either?
What about identity verification as part of any employment offer?
Some social problems just don't have technological solutions.
Those ten reports could be made by one person. That one person might not even know the person they're accusing. That one person might be a man. That one person might be a bot.
You'd have to ignore the last three decades of online identity, trolling and social media pitfalls to not recognize that.
And please don't compare reviewing a can opener on Amazon to accusing someone anonymously of a heinous crime on an app built by one person.
But I'm not sure I'm going to convince you with words so I'll suggest this:
Go and build this app.
Build it, see what happens. Nobody else has been able to crack this but maybe you can.
It might be relavent to who wins the lawsuit, but sometimes the mere existence of a lawsuit is pretty painful.
I mean if witches didn't do anything surely they wouldn't be hunted down.
A well-designed system will maximize utility for the former, and minimize utility for the latter. An app where women can leave what are practically anonymous reviews for men is not such a system.
This isn't all of the people, but in my experience in life it's more than enough to make this app impossible to filter.
A lot of men have had experiences like this one. Either directly or they know someone it happened to. Yeah #NotAllWomen but way too many will exploit the feminist #BelieveAllWomen culture to gain even trivial benefits. An app devoted to letting women anonymous gossip and engage in reputation warfare without fear of consequence, or even fear that the man might reply in self defense, is going to get flooded with women like the taxi passenger.
Go read some statistics on the number of women harassed, abused, raped, and killed every day—every single day—because they are women.
Go ask your mother, your sister, your wife, your female best friend, when they had their last abusive encounter.
Go ask your friends of both genders what the worst things are that could happen to them when walking home at night, and compare the responses.
Go read some historic accounts of how women were treated for… pretty much all of history.
Go look up news articles of what can happen to women when riding a taxi. Spoiler: it’s not just a threat.
Yes, there are some abusive women out there. Yes, it’s fucked up when that happens to you. But trying to insinuate the levels of violence against men would be even remotely comparable is just plain awful.
By people going on the same sort of rants like you just did.
Some People are terrible, especially when they think they can act without consequences.
Does that excuse men doing bad things too? No.
But it sure does (or should!) make anyone with a brain question hyperbolic claims of abuse or violence without actual evidence.
That's not what it is intended for, but many people after relationships end can be extremely emotional and sometimes very spiteful. It's not uncommon for people to embellish or lie about the truth to make themselves look better and the other person look shitty. Especially if you're the one being dumped, you may be even more likely to engage in petty behaviour.
I personally have experienced an ex making up a sexual assault story. This kind of app didn't exist then, but she even went as far as reporting me to the police. Luckily the police investigated and could easily discern it was a lie. Going to the police is obviously a much higher burden than using an app, and yet many females still go make false SA claims there. Do you really think it wouldn't be a common problem for people to do the same in an app at a much higher rate?
People often believe things like SA claims without any evidence and will often even attack people trying to defend the person or insist on some kind of proof. It means that someone making up bull crap on these apps is going to be treated like it is true, yet the rates of lies would likely be pretty high.
People can just be so crazy when it comes to relationships/love. Especially when it comes to people in their teens or early 20's, the brain isn't fully developed and dealing with these emotions is even more challenging and leads to even more rash decision making.
The more common it is, the more damaging false claims of it are. It's a self-defeating linear relationship.
I have seen false rape claims, false claims of child abuse, neglect, etc.
With zero repercussions, of course.
I still maintain my pet theory that this is a downstream effect of the normalization of paranoia around pedophiles that began hitting the mainstream in the '80s. The modern world is exceptionally safe, yet to the average person, it feels exceptionally dangerous.
...While I've got the hood up, I'll continue soapboxing.
I've started seeing rare instances such as a young woman walking around a corner and there is a man rounding the same corner, surprising her by mistake, and the woman starts crying or breathing in a panicked way, unable to regulate herself for several minutes. It's not always walking around the corner at the same time, but there's a common pattern of being surprised by a man just going about his day and experiencing a severe fear response to that interaction.
When I look at a lot of cultural related issues today, beyond just gender, I see many signs of pervasive psychological issues. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm very confident that the root cause is more complicated than something you can describe in a single sentence.
The same hypothetical 5% can inflict harm to multiple women, that's why multiple women and girls complained about Epstein and Trump.
But I was friends with my wife's friends before we got married, and in a sample size of ~20 women my age, every single one of them has experienced inappropriate and unwanted touching in social settings. And a large number of them were victims of outright rape.
In comparison, I have many male friends and of them, I only know one who has been wrongly accused of sexual assault (the lady openly talked about doing it to help with a promotion...)
So even if both sides may have a few bad apples, one side is a much more prevalent problem when it comes to the number of victims.
A remarkable fact that's stayed with me: Ken White (@popehat) once said that in his defamation law practice, his largest category of consultations was with clients who'd said negative things about a past romantic partner, who then threatened to sue. I believe his point was those negative things were true most of the time, but difficult to prove, or defend.
Yes, and? The service is protected in the US by Section 230, and Tea doesn't operate anywhere else currently. Individual users who use it defame are, in principal, subject to defamation liability, but in the US (and, again, that’s the only jurisdiction currently relevant), the burden to proving that the description was both false and at least negligently made (as well as the other elements of the tort) falls on the plaintiff (it is often said that “truth is an absolute defense”, but that’s misleading—falsity and fault are both elements of the prima facie case the plaintiff must establish.)
Sure, in a jurisdiction with strict liability for libel and where truth is actually a defense, and/or where the platform itself, being a deep pockets target, was exposed, Tea would be a more precarious business. But that’s not where it operates.
I suspect that's going to be more of a problem for Tea than hypothetical individual defamation cases.
Although having said that, how can you sue someone for defamation if you never find out you're being defamed?
Any woman can say "Don't date [name], he's a bad person" and the victim will never know.
Unless he asks a female friend for a social credit check, all [name] will see is a shrinking pool of opportunities.
"He's a bad person and you shouldn't date him" is an opinion you can legally express anywhere as much as you want.
I mean, I think it depends what you claim in this post.
I think sometimes folks don't properly threat model what can be done if someone chooses to think about what the consequences for breaking a rule are and letting that guide their actions, rather than striving to avoid breaking them out of some kind of moral principle.
coolcoolcool. I'm sure that never ever gets abused horrifically.
Men's driver licenses were not distributed online. Only women's driver licenses were distributed online.
I assume the app then runs facial recognition.
This may be legal in the US, but not under GDPR. Pictures of faces are biometric data (explicitly listed as such), which falls under additional restrictions beyond personally identifiable information.
A drivers license with the picture blacked out would be less sensitive than the picture itself!
Where you come from, people arent allowed to share their own experiences interacting with third parties without the third parties consent?
Sounds pretty oppressive, but there are absolutely many jurisdictions where that is not the case.
Cool, I'm sure Tea is only available to report things about United States citiz... nevermind.
It runs afoul of about a dozen european rights to privacy, imagery and consent laws. And that's just by posting pictures ! Libel and slander are a bunch of others, right to a response is also another... the list is long. It is, once again, yet another dudebro trying to skirt legality.
The EU is welcome to try to enforce its local laws on the US operations of a US business open only to US users, but I don’t think its going to have much success.
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2024-10/edpb_2024041...
That boat already sailed and it already happened. "US only operations" does not matter (which is already bullshit, as Tea does not verify that users are US ones, they merely disabled downloading in the play/app store): posting pictures of European citizens runs afoul of European laws. Sure, they can't come and arrest you on US soil. Just don't travel too much.
The document you linked is interesting but I'm skeptical that you actually read it. It effectively says that in practice there's no hope of enforcing actions against entities that are purely in the US unless their behavior has run afoul of state or federal policy.
It does note that if concrete damages are recognized by the court that there is a decent chance US courts will cooperate to enforce the judgment. But the vast majority of GDPR enforcement is punitive as opposed to compensatory so it's not particularly relevant.
I'm also not clear why you think traveling would matter. DPA penalties are administrative in nature, not criminal. They are also likely to be levied against corporations as opposed to individuals. My guess is that the extremely unlikely worst case is your entry or visa application getting denied.
Tea can collect and use photos of EU citizens, if it collected them in the USA, with (all other things being equal) no fear of GDPR violations.
So, yes Facebook can't collect photos of EU citizens, then process and do "stuff" with them in the USA, without violating GDPR, because that'd be the easiest out ever for multinational tech companies.
It is the location of the subject of the personal data collection that matters, not their citizenship.
Two Germans shooting each other in Australia break Australian law, but not German law.
Its the only country in the world where Tea operates or is open to users, what other country’s laws do you think apply to it?
Even the open platforms creep me out. I don’t like seeing unverified accounts of crime in Nextdoor, I think if you see some crime you go to the police. I had a series of in person interactions with a woman which seemed creepy in retrospect, her Nextdoor was full of creepy stuff including screenshots of creepy online interactions. At least this gives everyone clear evidence they should keep away.
Or in this case, sharing personal information about yourself...
…is clearly not the US, which has probably the most expansive understanding of “freedom of speech” in the world.
The USA doesn't even rank in the top 15 on the human freedom index. Most freedom indices don't even put the USA in the top 20. A few don't even put the USA in the top 30.
Imagining a future where I have to pay Tea to promote and astroturf my profile or they lower my rating, and pay bot farms to post glowing reviews
Yes, as far as I understand, you upload pictures of men, either taken in the wild or from dating sites (Tinder) against their will. I am pretty sure that this would be illegal in some jurisdictions. Especially EU.
Without bias and gossip, who would even want to use the app?
Do we have more physical violence from men towards women than the opposite? I think I saw that the reality is yes. Does it mean that men are biologically coded to be violent, or is it a question of education and culture?
If you conclude the second one, it is not "sexist" (on the contrary, it may even be that the culture that creates the problem is itself rooted in sexism and that acknowledging some reality about its existence may help changing this culture), and does not imply prejudice against men, just acknowledging that we need to be careful in case of bad apples.
It still means that talking about this requires to be very careful.
To react on your example, I think it is a good think to notice if some population have a bigger problem at this subject than others, and we can then identify more easily the places where this problem forms and target these places. But people who concludes "look at violence divided by race, so I can generalise and be prejudicial to everyone in some race and not other" are idiots.
It feels a bit like saying "there is a bug in software X, but there is also a bug in software Y, so let's not fix the bug in software X".
Of course, men also suffer from problems. It even feels that it is usually also due to machismo or something similar. Sometimes, it feels like the majority of men's problem is in fact self-inflicted by the manosphere. They both complain of suicide rate, army draft, violence against men, but they also promote a culture of not-showing-emotion-otherwise-you-are-not-manly, a-man-is-worthless-if-they-dont-succeed, army-is-manly-and-women-are-weak, a-man-should-show-dominence-and-other-men-are-a-threath, ...
People likes to see things in black or white, but the reality is more complicated, and there is no advantages that does not bring also some disadvantages.
However, homosexual relationships has equal rate of partner violence as heterosexual ones. A bisexual woman that has a relationship with an other woman will double her rate of physical violence compare to relationship with a man (statically). A man who has a relationship with an other man will half his rate of violence. This makes no sense at all (unless we believe that sexual orientation is an factor for violent behavior), unless we add a additional factor of sexual dimorphism. Men are on average larger and more muscular, and there seems to be a correlation between being the larger/stronger and using physical strength/fists during a fight. The smaller person is in return more likely to use tools or other means of violence. Statistically, fist also has a higher probability to do damage than improvised weapons, since people are more proficient in using their fists.
Does it mean men are biologically coded to be violent? No. Is it a question about education and culture. Maybe in some countries/cultures, and it wouldn't hurt to use the education system to teach people conflict resolution. Getting people who are physically larger to not exploit that fact during a heated fight is likely a hard problem to solve on a population level.
I think "any form of violence" is not a constructive direction. First, this ends up being very subjective: between 2 forms of psychological violence, which one is the most violent? Secondly, if indeed it is cultural, it implies that different sub-culture may have different ways of acting, so we can always play the subgroups to make it says whatever we want. But most importantly, it is not very relevant for our context: in the case of the first interactions during heterosexual dating, pretending that men risk as much as women seems a very unconvincing claim, for several reasons (even if under-represented it should be under-represented to an unrealistic level to reach an equal level, and it also does not fit with plenty of cultural tropes (I can find a video explaining explicitly that manly men need to dominate their female partner. I'm sure it exists, but the simple fact that I cannot easily find a video explaining explicitly that womenly women need to dominate their male partner shows it's not that of a trope. On the other hand, I can also easily find videos about "trad wife" that will explain that a womenly woman must be with a dominating man))
For the rest, I think we say the same thing: talking about the visible issues is not a problem in itself, but people instrumentalising these issues to be racist or sexist are the problem.
If it's almost all about the size of the specific two people in a relationship, it's a terrible terrible idea to aggregate that by gender, leading to completely misplaced wariness and judgement.
It looks very clear to me that violent behavior in relationship (and more specifically, in the first few days of dating) is a question of education, not the result of one person being bigger. For example, every parents are stronger than their young children, but only some kind of parent are violent towards their children. If it's a question of education, reducing the problem of the size of the people is a terrible terrible idea: the problem will never go away because you don't understand the source and therefore don't act on the source to fix it.
It feels like some people here are framing the problem in "men vs women" framework, as if it is a competition and they don't want to accept that maybe men behavior is different from women behavior because the way they are raised in our society. I don't really see the point: I'm a man, and yet I don't take it personally. The same way I don't take it personally when someone says "don't accept candy from strangers": I'm a stranger for a lot of kids, and yet I understand why they should be prudent and I understand that, in situation where I have to interact with an unknown kid, I should do things differently (for example not giving them candy), not because I'm a danger for them, but because it is true that there is danger and that they cannot know if I'm a danger or not.
So many men take it uselessly and nonconstructively personally as soon as it is dating.
> Black people are the most likely to experience domestic violence—either male-to-female or female-to-male—followed by Hispanic people and White people.2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The national intimate partner and sexual violence survey: 2010-2012 state report.
> Asian people are the least likely to experience intimate partner violence.[1]
[1] https://www.verywellmind.com/domestic-violence-varies-by-eth...
Doesn't look correct.
18k men are murdered. But women are murdered by their partners at a higher rate.
> Partner violence appears to account for ~34% of violence against women[2] (but vs. 6% for men)
And this is sort of the point of the comment higher up: when you cut the stat this way, it seems like men are wildly dangerous creeps. But it is a statistic comparing one group to another group. We need to instead look at the absolute rate of partner violence to decide if men are on the whole violent murders or so, and there, the overall risk is low.
[1]: https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims
[2]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offende...
[3]: (I've assumed a round population of 340M for the US, with 50/50 gender, just an approximation.)
Not exactly. The statistics didn't specify the gender identity of the perpetuator, just the relationship to the victim and the gender identity of the victim.
Edit: 100% are murder victims
https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offende...
I have no idea if their number is correct for that either.
But... you're trying to correct their statistics?
I agree with you that in the context, your stats maybe make more sense. But if you're going to correct someone, you generally should recognize what they were trying to communicate in the first place.
humans in general act like psychos, the danger comes more from the size differential than propensity to act like a jerk.
2020 USA Per Capita Count of Mortality Event: Assault(Homicide), Female: 0.00139%
https://datacommons.org/tools/visualization#visType%3Dtimeli...
If such a service exists and isn’t being too effective, shouldn’t that be worked on?
My guess is that there’s more to the reasons for why Tea is popular but the safety argument is largely being used to defend it
I think this is called "the police"
The answer to your last two questions is found within section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
It's only not a thing because, in the U.S., it's redundant. In other jurisdictions, it might be a thing, because there are places where a claim can be both defamatory and true.
"This guy is a creeper and treats romantic partners terribly" is pure opinion, and cannot be defamatory. The (rare) kinds of opinion statements that can be defamatory generally take the form of "I believe (subjective thing) about this person because I observed (objective thing)", where "(objective thing)" is itself false. "The vibe I get about this person is that they hunt humans for sport" does not take that form and is almost certainly not defamatory.
Under US law, providers are generally not liable for defamatory content generated by users unless you can show they materially encouraged that content in its specifics, which is a high bar app providers are unlikely to clear.
That is true. But i think untrained and emotionaly involved individuals will have trouble navigating the boundaries of defamation. Instead of writing opinions like “treats romantic partners terribly” they will write statements purporting facts like “this creep lured me to his house, raped me, and gave me the clap”. This is not an opinion but three individually provable statements of facts. Plus the third would be considered “defamation per se” in most jurisdictions if it were false. (The false allegation that someone has an STD is considered so loathsome that in most places the person wouldn’t need to prove damages.)
Unles specifically coached people would write this second way. Both because it is rethoricaly more powerfull, but also because they would report on their own personal experience. To be able to say “treats romantic partners terribly” they would need to canvas multiple former partners and then put their emotionaly charged stories into calm terms. That requires a lot of work. While the kind of message i’m suggesting only requires the commenter to report things they personaly know about. And in an emotionaly charged situation, like a breakup, people would be more likely to exagarate in their descriptions, making defamatory claims more likely.
> Under US law, providers are generally not liable for defamatory content generated by users…
This is true, and i believe this is the real key. Even if the commenters would be liable, the site themselves would be unlikely to become liable with them.
1. To prove that the factual claims made by the defendant were false, and that the defendant should have known they were false
2. That you suffered actual damages from those claims
Very hard to make happen on a dating app.
Standard disclaimer that law varies by jurisdiction. However, that limited list typically includes claims that the person committed a crime. Many juristictions also include accusing someone of having a contagious disease, engaging in sexual misconduct, or engaging is misconduct that is inconsistent with proper conduct in their profession.
In other words, the types of things I would expect people to be talking about on tea overlap heavily with defamation per-se.
If the users were careful to make all of their statements opinions, that defense would work. However, I doubt that is the case. Instead, I expect many users to include example of what their ex did that led to their opinion; which gets directly into the realm of factual statements.
The provider protections are real, and likely protect the app from direct lawsuits (or, at least from losing them), but do not protect the app's users. A few news stories about an abusive ex going after their former partner based on what they posted in the app could be enough to scare users away. You don't even need to win the lawsuit if your goal is to harass the other person.
What happened on the tea app were probably not knowable, observable or refutable for those actually being doxxed or slandered.
That isn’t me saying 4chan is absolutely morally in the clear, but it’s still quite a significant distinction.
It seems like your argument is based on (1) the discussion being slander (assumption); and (2) the idea that you could refute it if it were public (good luck, low credibility, also most men would immediately respond with vulgar name calling and - at least if anonymous - threats).
- The fact that this app exists solidifies the data that a small group of men/women do most of the dating on tinder etc while the vast majority land dates far less if none at all.
- This creates distorted market supply and demand where those small group of men/women become sought after and its only human nature in that they value their supply less than the rest.
- Toxic behavior is expected from that small group of highly attractive people that do all the dating.
- It was only a matter of time before such app would run into legal issues or attract angry individuals. Now the damage to the leaked identities will be prolonged. With the AI tech today, the extent to which a damage can be doned with the information from the leaks is unknown.
- As for the company behind Tea, they are done. They face a monumental class action lawsuit as well as ongoing individual civil/criminal cases that will arise from the leaked identities, in particular the photo of driver licenses as well as selfies, usernames, emails drastically increase the surface area for damages.
- The users of this site and those that have directly posted images, details have opened themselves up to significant liability from not only the men they have targeted but from law enforcement.
- We'll see some new laws being formed from this case. Once again, we see the hidden dangers of blindly trusting large popular platforms with sensitive data but the twist with Tea here is the defamation activity that opens up its users to both civil and criminal liability.
I don't follow.
> This creates distorted market supply and demand where those small group of men/women become sought after
Isn't that true in the real world as well? I'm not exactly a hunk; people weren't tripping over themselves to ask me out, whereas some of my friends and acquaintances did have to figuratively beat people off with a stick.
I suspect the folks complaining about "markets" in online dating are not the kind of people who can connect offline.
To be fair, I think online dating has gotten worse -- sites like OkCupid used to match you based on shared affinity... the issue there is you could be a very high match on shared values but not someone's "type" visually -- imagine being shown the girl of your dreams only to find out the feeling is not mutual :-)
Conversely, I feel like people sometimes forget that they opted into these interactions, it's not like someone strolled up in a bar and began talking at them.
Anyways... if you're frustrated with apps, I'd suggest doing just that. Talk to people.
I met my last girlfriend at a bus stop. Before that, on a porch -- I was walking by and struck up a convo.
If you can't connect with people organically, no amount of tech can save you.
I take doxing, stalking, revenge porn and cyber bullying very seriously! And I would pay good money for a background check, to stay away from such people.
Buddy, believe me, women who are using Tea would pay to know that they need to avoid you too.
Seems like the simple solution here is for Tea to allow men to register and advertise themselves as not interested in Tea users, maybe by linking profiles from dating apps.
- This creates distorted market supply and demand where those small group of men/women become sought after and its only human nature in that they value their supply less than the rest.
- Toxic behavior is expected from that small group of highly attractive people that do all the dating.
- It was only a matter of time before such app would run into legal issues or attract angry individuals. Now the damage to the leaked identities will be prolonged. With the AI tech today, the extent to which a damage can be done is unknown (ex. deepfake, impersonations, further doxxing).
- Tea user's driver licenses as well as selfies, usernames, emails, posts about their dates will drastically increase the surface area for lawsuits, fraud and exploitation by malicious agents.
- The users of this site and those that have directly posted images, details have opened themselves up to significant legal and criminal liability. Given these apps were probably popular in large city centers like California, NY have heavy punishment for digital harassment and privacy violations on top of the damages that can be claimed against them by the men who's information and details were posted.
- Tea is largely insulated from what the users post which means that their biggest exposure might be just neglect and failure to secure data which comes with a slap on the wrist. Which will make it harder for Tea's userbase to claim large damages against it.
I read more details about this case and its beyond egregious. Unencrypted firebase and full public buckets. There is no hacking involved, the tokens were being used to pull data from roughly all 30,000 users of Tea and were only blocked short while ago.
Allegedly, 60GB of photos, user personal information, driver license, gps data being shared on torrent. A map of all 30,000 users tied to GPS data is being posted as well.
Given the extreme neglect to secure their data, I now believe Tea will be open to even bigger legal liability possibly criminal even.
In some cultures, mentioning dating apps will immediately lead to negative assumptions and connections are done through vetted networks and specific establishments where "hunting" activity is allowed, some with even more boundary pushing that would be impossible in Western culture.
Let me share a message I got from a woman I met a couple years ago on a dating site: "Just a side note about the dating thing on here. I get very annoyed with how horribly men take care of themselves or even try to communicate. Most men today on these sites are repulsive. It was refreshing to see you smile, and look nice. Thank you for that."
So it's not a bunch of red-pill alpha guys. I'm an average guy with basic manners and a lack of creepiness. Heck I was near my all time high weight at the time. Every single woman on those things has at least one story about a guy she met that will make you cringe from his behavior. My fav was the guy who sent a woman flowers before even meeting her - at her workplace! Dude the cyberstalking you need to do to pull that off is CREEPY AF - not romantic.
If you want to be in that top 10 percent of men the bar is incredibly low.
Yeah, I wouldn't worry about the allegedly part, 4chan is dissecting that torrent as we speak, it's quite the party.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3e5a8c55eb4720b4fbd1d0fb5c45adb0fad53569&dn=tea
Why do people want to live in a panopticon of their own creation, with random anonymous strangers morally policing, judging each other with zero consequence to them?
Don't think we'll ever learn our lesson when it comes to privacy, it will be Eternal September forever.
The irony in this case being that this app operates like a lot of creep subreddits and forums out there with people posting photos of other people without their permission and gossiping / telling stories about them...
Witch Hunt as a Service, with a delightful UX, a little gamification, and soon integration with your favorite apps. Coming to an App Store near you.
So much for the "anonymous" app.
This is the scary reality of an app like this, especially if it continued to go more mainstream.
However there is something to be said about the crowd you find yourself with. If you assume this app to be necessary, I would assume your social standards are not high enough.
What's the bar they cannot clear?
But regardless i do understand the appeal. Dating apps suffer from basically being a low-information market place. There are of course the malicious people, which everyone has an interest in removing from the app. However even ignoroing that its a bit of a lemons market (if you excuse how dehumanizing the metaphor is). Its very hard to tell if someone is a good date just from their profile, and people who are good dates end up in relationships and exit the market quickly while bad dates stay in the market for a much longer time. Allowing some sort of review system does solve that problem - its worked in other domains, like uber drivers or what resturant to go to. So i certainly understand the appeal of why people would want this.
I don't have a fix for this, it is entirely fair to want justice for the defenseless. At the same time I have a strong hunch that there is no problem-solution fit here, at least not with this sort of app.
* App Store review requires a lightweight security audit / checklist on the backend protections.
* App Store CTF Kill Switch. Publisher has to share a private CTF token with Apple with a public name (e.g. /etc/apple-ctf-token ). The app store can automatically kill the app if the token is ever breached.
* Publisher is required to include their own sensitive records ( access to a high-value bank account) within their backend . Apple audits that these secrets are in the same storage as the consumer records.
* App publishing process includes signatures that the publisher must embed in their database. When those signatures end up on the dark web, App Store is notified and the App is revoked
You have a lot of interesting suggestions.
I would love to see some kind of forced transparency. Too bad back-end code doesn’t run under any App/Play Store control, so it’s harder to force an (accurate) audit.
We could do better in our trade at encouraging best practices in this space. Every time there's a breach , the community shames the publisher . But the real shame is on us for not establishing better auditing protocols. Security best practices are just the start. You have to have transparent, ongoing auditing and pen-testing to sustain it.
The idea has merit. You have to relinquish some control to establish security. Look at App Store, Microsoft Store , MacOS App store -- they all sandbox and reduce API scope in order to improve security for consumers.
I'm more on the side of autonomy and trust, but then we have reckless developers doing stuff like this, putting the whole industry on watch.
The onus is on users to protect themselves, not the OS. As long as the OS enables the users to do what they want, no security policy will totally protect the user from themselves.
"use your brain" is no substitute for security. This is a hacker forum. We think about how to protect apps. Even smart people have slipped up
Meanwhile, in the UK, new legislation requires me to upload my face and driver's license just to browse Reddit.
On a more serious note, implementing such a law without also providing a 0-knowledge authentication system ready to use by the government is just so unbelievably stupid (for multiple unrelated reasons).
r/ukguns r/cider r/sexualassault r/stopsmoking
Think of the children!
It isn't just gossip websites requiring this, and it isn't just gossip websites suffering breaches.
Sorry, well deserved ladies. It just made my day. ROTFL.
And please provide an app with all the names and pictures of the ladies who used it. So that I can easily check who not to date.
Oh wait—no such thing exists!
It's up to us to teach this to our children. There's no hope of getting the current generations of Internet users to grasp the simple idea that app/website backends are black boxes to you, the user, such that there is absolutely nothing preventing them from selling the personal information you gave them to anyone they see fit, or even just failing to secure it properly.
Without being a developer yourself or having this information drilled into you at a young age, you're just going to grow up naively thinking that there's nothing wrong with giving personal information such as photos of your driver's license to random third parties that you have no reason to trust whatsoever, just because they have a form in their app or on their website that requests it from you.
even the most savvy consumers slip up, or are in a hurry. it's impossible to make a perfect security decision every time
How do you enforce the token actually exists? Do app developers have to hire some auditing firm to attest all their infra actually have the token available? Seems expensive.
The EV certs failed because general SSL identity is pretty weak. Consumers don't know how to use it to establish trust. There's no enforcement on how the names are used. for example, my county treasurer has me transfer thousands of dollars on a random domain name.
Presumably the risk/reward still favors risky practices.
There will always be lowest-common-denominator users, but there is clearly some demand for an alternative to the biggest 5 websites...
Interesting play, calling 95% of users "lowest-common-denominator". Those silly, blabbering morons that don't understand that they should be running Bazzite on their Framework laptops instead of using evil evil sofware.
>there is clearly some demand for an alternative to the biggest 5 websites...
This demand doesn't pay, and also happens to be some of the most demanding, entitled users you'll have ever seen.
Mmmhmm
Now that's a creative solution! Every admin must have a table called `MY_PERSONAL_INFO` in their DB.
If you want companies to care about security then you need to make it affect their bottom line.
This wasn't the work of some super hacker. They literally just posted the info in public.
> We can reduce the latency of discovery and resolution by adding software protocols.
Can we? What does this even mean?
[Edit: i guess you mean the things in your parent comment about requiring including some sort of canary token in the DB. I'm skeptical about that as it assumes certain db structure and is difficult to verify compliance.
More importantly i don't really see how it would have stopped this specific situation. It seems like the leak was published to 4chan pretty immediately. More generally how do you discover if the token is leaked, in general? Its not like the hackers are going to self-report.]
My bigger concern though is how you translate that into discovering such breaches. Are you just googling for your token once a day? This breach was fairly public but lots of breaches are either sold or shared privately. By the time its public enough to show up in a google search usually everyone already knows the who and what of the breach. I think it would be unusual for the contents of the breach to be publicly shared without identifying where the contents came from.
My SSN / private information has been leaked 10+ now. I had identify fraud once, resulting in ~8 hours of phone calls to various banks resulting in everything being removed.
What are my damages?
Its not like anyone intentionally posts their entire DB to the internet.
That is why Tea did not operate in Europe.
Women are anonymously spilling tea about men in their cities on viral app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682914 - July 2025 (17 comments)
Edit: Nevermind, looks like Tea has been around for quite some time already. But it kinda flew under the radar with a fairly small user base.
I just hope they can pursue legal action for this, whether it was a deliberate trap or not.
This has evolutionary origins. A man can, theoretically, father around a thousand children or more in the time it takes a woman to bear one. Sperm are cheap so those who need sperm (i.e. women) don't need to fight with each other. There's plenty to go around. Eggs are scarce so males of myriad species fight each other to the death over them.
It's just biology.
Not a great look here.
However, Tea could have done a modicum of cybersecurity work (or hired an outside firm) to prevent this. If they are claiming to want to keep women safe (and not just running a gossip board) then this should be a red alert for them. No public acknowledgement is concerning...
I don't know how can anyone feel wrong about this without feeling even worse for what was already taking place.
I have no doubt in my mind that this is what they did. An "outside firm" vibe coded this and delivered the results.
Conceivably these storage endpoints might’ve never been directly exposed to mobile clients, instead going through other proxies or CDNs.
Let ladies have some of their own medicine.
1st sentence: "exposed database"
We need a more nuanced headline here. They did nothing responsible. 404 should title this story with something that will blame them first and the 'hackers' 2nd.
It's not just that this database was accessible via the internet. It was all public data. Storing people's IDs in a public database is just... wow.
We have a couple of decades more until we lock tech up, up until now it was all fun and games, but now and in the future tech will be everywhere and will be load bearing
I bet on greed. It always wins.
Yeah, we’ve finally, nearly, just got to the point where realizing that treating IT and security and such as simply a cost centre to be minimised maybe quite wasn’t leading to optimal security outcomes - to throwing it all away again.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/misconfigured...
Facebook shouldn't legally be allowed to demand an ID any more than this disaster of an "app."
Now tens of thousands of people will be subject to identity theft because someone thought this was a neat growth hacking pattern for their ethically dubious idea of a social networking site.
Link to the related web standard https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
Simple solution: decriminalize uttering to any person who is not an employee of the government or a regulated bank.
https://theconversation.com/porn-websites-now-require-age-ve...
This will prove security in IT coding is necessary, so enjoy watching the drama unfold.
IT security bonanza time. It wont be long.
RIP
>DRIVERS LICENSES AND FACE PICS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE BEFORE THEY SHUT IT DOWN!
>Tea App uploads all user verification submissions to this public firebase storage bucket with the prefix "attachments/": [link, now offline]
>Yes, if you sent Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing. It's a public bucket. I have written a Python script which scrapes the bucket and downloads all the images, page by page, so you can see if you're in it: [pastebin link]
>The censoring in picrel was added by me. The images in the bucket are raw and uncensored. Nice "anonymous" app. This is what happens when you entrust your personal information to a bunch of vibe-coding DEI hires.
>I won't be replying to this or making any more threads about it. I did my part, God bless you all. Regards, anon
Being so careless with people's personal data should be a major crime, tbh. If I manipulated thousands of people to let me scan their passports and various other bits of personal info, then just left the copies around the city for people to find, I'd be prosecuted, and rightfully so.
"Tea was founded by Sean Cook, a tech innovator inspired by his mother’s unsettling encounters with online dating, including catfishing and meeting men with hidden criminal pasts. His goal? Create a women-only space where users can post honest reviews, red flags, and personal stories about men they’ve dated. Unlike traditional dating apps, Tea isn’t about swiping for matches—it’s about safety. The app offers tools like background checks, catfish verification through “Catfish Finder AI,” and a secure community forum called “The Tea Party Group Chat.” Plus, 10% of its profits go to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, amplifying its commitment to women’s safety.
The app’s anonymous platform is its heart, letting women share warnings without fear. One user’s story stands out: Sarah, a 28-year-old from Chicago, posted about her ex, who seemed charming but turned violent. After escaping the relationship, she learned he was active on dating apps. Her Tea post detailed his behavior, and later, another user reached out on social media, thanking her for the warning that kept her from a dangerous date."
https://www.hypefresh.com/new-tea-app-lets-women-warn-others...
Women who were sexually assaulted tried to warn other women about their assaulter on the app. Anon doxxed these sexual assault victims, re-victimizing them. Anon thinks that it's men who were victimized and want to take revenge on these women who experienced sexual assault.
It's expected that anon is misogynist, and now the talking point is that these women are perpetrators of misandry who got what they deserve.
Either use the criminal justice system.
Or form a lynch mob and stand behind your lynching.
But don't cry when you have chosen the route of self organized violence with zero checks and balances, clear examples of lynching the wrong people, then running and hiding back behind "civilized society" when your inept violence backfires.
You are no different to Kiwi Farms, I suggest you look to their site for tips on how to protect yourself while being violent on others.
Kiwi Farms also has a list of sexual abusers they have helped stop, some really horrific people.... but like "Tea" that's not the full story.
Until then it is "ironic"
Whether the original intent was honourable or not - or if they decide to spend part of their income to a honourable cause - does not factor in to the nature of the system.
Worse, in some jurisdictions (I’m not certain about the US specifics), this kind of unsanctioned exposure could actively hinder legal prosecution of actual predators. If a person is publicly accused on a non-official platform before trial, any resulting lawsuit might be thrown out on grounds of prejudicial exposure or even perjury. The accused could claim that the testimony is tainted or retaliatory — particularly if the platform enables near-anonymous posting without formal vetting^1.
[1] Yes, the app collects driver’s licenses. But let’s be honest: in the U.S., a fake driver’s license is practically a rite of passage. Entire generations of underage teens have used them to get into clubs and bars. If that’s your trust anchor, you don’t have much of one.
A criminal justice system has to protect even the accused against injustice. If it doesn't, it's not justice, but just a kangaroo court.
The proof is in the pudding.
It was built for doxxing and quite potentially spreading lies about men and on top of that, they doxxed all of their users, too. They pretty much doxxed everyone who used the app or was mentioned on the platform.
I don’t see how it is not a doxxing app, but go ahead and find me another PR article that says it is the best thing since sliced bread and the founders should be saints.
The selling point is you sign up and can share, support, amplify fellow doxers. A community for the non-Chan-ish, but Chan-ish, crowd to commune.
But when your in, it looks like your the first sign up.
To you. To the rest of the world all your sign up info is on DoxedMyself.com.
But I don’t have the time. So feel free to Y-combinate to your hearts worth! On me!
It's fucked up that you can't have an honest app to keep people safe, but the makers could have known the problems in advance, and probably did.
> One user’s story stands out
In which precisely nothing happened. We don't even know the nature of the alleged violence.
> It's expected that anon is misogynist
Did you just give a negative impression of someone you don't know?
Anon doxxed women who might have restraining orders against violent stalkers, and they assumed that female coders created the female-based app by referring to "vibe-coding DEI hires".
Why are you defending a doxxer hacker?
How hard would it be to believe that none of that was true and the woman was being vindictive?
People can be shitty, including women.
Trust is a hard thing to come by online, even when people aren't anonymous and speaking publicly (Facebook or any other online place where one might use their real name). Giving people the cover of privacy from the person they are reporting about isn't going to increase the veracity of what's posted.
We already know how people behave online. It's either naive, ignorant or negligent to think otherwise.
Western society has become actively anti-dating lately (think: ever since the 1980s). People, especially women, are actively encouraged to scrutinise even minor behaviour for red flags, after all, every man is a potential serial killer. This is so prevalent that we have made movies about that sort of paranoia ... and there are people in treatment over it. Clinically, this is often referred to as hypervigilance/paranoia syndrome, a pattern related to PTSD — both as a consequence of trauma and, paradoxically, as a source of relational dysfunction.
This is not meant to downplay the reality of actual assaults. But it points to a deeper systemic issue: The drive to protect against potential violence has, in some circles, taken on a life of its own - and in doing so, it has poisoned trust.
So - I do not claim your 4 women were not at some point scared by a guy during a date. But what used to be considered 'assertive, reliable, masculine' behaviour in the 1950s has become 'prelude to slaughter' these days, especially when other factors are present (e.g. 'he doesn't turn out to be Prince Charming that I expected' or 'he decided to split the bill').
So ... if there is an actual case of domestic violence, the solution is not to create an instrument that can be badly abused and does not follow rule of law - it is to go to ... law enforcement, and let the courts deal with it. IF the guy is a problem, let them put him away, rather than slandering him online.
Another called (a different woman) a “dirty bitch” when she declined a second date.
Amongst my female friends, I’ve become aware only in my late 40s just how many have suffered sexual assault outside of relationships or controlling and abusive behaviour within them.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think women being vigilant is rational behaviour. In my twenties and thirties I just lacked the imagination to see that colleagues and even male friends would behave in this way, but that can and have.
I don’t think this site is necessarily the right way to fix the problem, but I can totally understand the motivation.
The “sex toy guy” (and yes, I now imagine the most awkward and presumptuous version of that scenario - perhaps with a flourish of presentation) is clearly socially tone-deaf. But if no coercion or violence took place: Should his name and face be broadcast online so he can be branded “The Dildo King” for life?
The “dirty bitch” guy? Rude and vulgar, certainly. But how many women have made disparaging comments about men — their height, their hair, their genitals - sometimes in front of them, sometimes with friends? We should strive for dignity and respect on both sides. If we accept social shaming as a norm, it shouldn’t surprise us when the pendulum swings both ways - and no one wins in that world. Was the woman in this case threatened or harmed beyond a verbal outburst?
Being in my mid-40s, I’ve also witnessed what a false or misguided accusation can do to a man - careers destroyed, relationships severed, even suicides.
What we’re dealing with is a cultural and moral challenge - not a technological one. And cultural problems can only be solved through dialogue, mutual respect, and shared norms - not through factionalism or digital vigilantism.
I think we need to remember that this isn’t a one-way street.
the vast majority of posts are speculation on someone being douchey or a cheater. women in their twenties seem to really enjoy browsing through the gossip.
No it ain't.
The first sentence is already a lie as there was never authorization in place followed by more lies.
> The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.
What exactly does this mean? Which information is exchanged without consent of these people? This seems to me more problematic than the actual topic of the data breach.
1) you dated a guy on tinder, he became all pushy on your first date, touched you inappropriately even though you said no. Or some guy became violent during your relationship and you even found out he has a history of that.
2) you dated a nice guy but he dumped you for whatever reason, and now you want to get back at him so you make up stuff like mentioned above, and post it there.
Now if someone says something online it can be read for years and often without context of when it was originally written.
There is a much higher concern for data validation and no one used HTTPS 20 years ago. Literally there were social networks with people uploading photos and personal stuff which didn't even have HTTPS.
I check all CVE's of the software my clients use because we need to figure out why things are broken and often this is a start -> unpatched CVE's. Most (by far) CVE's are not 'honest mistakes' or missed corner cases because rocket-science; they are just sloppy programming. Something that should never pass review. We DO know better but people ship things and hope for the best (including the case in this post etc).
duxup•18h ago
That seems about right.
darth_avocado•16h ago
JohnMakin•16h ago
duxup•15h ago
This app operates just like an app some creep online would use, people post pictures (permission or not) and gossip about them.
jahewson•14h ago
ryandv•12h ago
chneu•8m ago
There are plenty of examples of people making things up about other people who they thought wronged them. Mob justice is really disgusting, and that's all this site is. People justify horribly vindictive behavior when they think they're righting a perceived wrong.
darkwizard42•14h ago
BizarroLand•14h ago
But then again, can't convince people as a whole that men are, on average, good and decent people with normal flaws just like women, and therefore deserve to be protected, loved, and appreciated equally.