Tough to say :) Vaguely reminiscent of SNI troubles on the web server... which can depend on the client. I thought that was becoming exceedingly irrelevant, though.
Isn't this basically Peeple except gender locked to women? Peeple failed because they couldn't eliminate bias and gossip against anyone. If someone was jealous of another, for example, that person could just write false slander and claim it was real with no evidence. That would have affected the victim for jobs, dates, etc. So it was laughed at by VCs and everyone online and it shut down.
How is Tea even legal? Isn't this just a legal libel timebomb waiting to happen?
Defamation (libel and slander) consists of false statements (or direct implications) of fact. Actionable defamation consists either of those false claims that cause quantifiable damages, or that claim things that are per se considered damaging --- a specific and limited list.
"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.
> or that claim things that are per se considered damaging --- a specific and limited list
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.
It does, but those bars to defamation claims are based on the US Constitution more than they are on state law. I think another way to put that is that I gave the maximally generous interpretation to the plaintiff there.
> "This guy is a creeper and treats romantic partners terribly" is pure opinion, and cannot be defamatory.
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.
Worth pointing out that you're talking purely from a US point of view, and different countries treat slander and libel differently.
For example in the US, to sue for defamation you need to prove something is false, whereas in the UK the defendant has to prove that what they said or wrote (and are being sued for) is true.
(I've no idea whether this app had any non-US use, but thought worth adding this comment regardless since it's a general point about defamation law and being discussed on a site with a big international audience.)
A general plug that if you read this comment and thought “damn, 1st amendment law sounds complex and interesting”, you may want to check out https://www.serioustrouble.show/ , a podcast about legal news with a recurring focus on 1st amendment law and cases
The fact that it verifies by ID scan is also not safe at all for a million different reasons.
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
I think you underestimate the willingness of people to pay to troll, it may filter out people but an app that was (in theory) meant to be secure shouldn't think of a problem as filtering rather than securing. Admins knowing peoples' identities simply moves the weakest link in the chain to the admins. I think an app like this was doomed from the start and 4chan simply pulled the plug on an already leaking bathtub.
I've thought about buying throwaway phone numbers just to troll linkedin. I'd be surprised if people weren't finding ways to get accounts on apps like this for trolling.
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
no, but it is _tremendously_ more difficult than email or even ID scans (unless you're doing actual verification, which is both more expensive and complicated than just charging a nominal fee or even just attaching a Card object to a stripe customer). Just getting to stand on top of an extremely robust existing system (payments) gets you so much adjacent help in keeping bad actors out, or at least getting it down to a human-team manageable level. It can be the difference between a viable business and not.
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.
> you act like it's impossible to get payment credentials that have nothing to do with the user
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
Hey now! They use ID verification bub - how are you gonna fake that? It’s not like there are just public buckets of legitimate ID photos taken by real women for you to hoover up. Check mate.
The difference is, on these platforms you're rating legal entities. On Tea, you're rating, or rather sharing personal information about, an individual. Where I come from, sharing personal data of someone without their consent is not allowed.
Also on those platforms you can see if people are trash talking you even if you don’t have a procedure to face your accuser.
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.
Unless they are intimate images (in which case revenge porn laws are likely to apply), copyrightable images for which someone other than the poster is the creator posted without the copyright holder’s permission (in which case copyright applies), or being used for commercial promotion or to suggest endorsement (in which case, depending on which states law applies, state law right of personality/publicity, especially if the subject is a celebrity, might apply), that's generally legal in the US.
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.
> It runs afoul of about a dozen european rights to privacy, imagery and consent laws
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.
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.
While the GDPR has extraterritoriality, you are over-reaching here.
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.
Facebook can't do it because Facebook has a legal presence in Europe and does business with European advertisers and financial companies. If a business doesn't have, and doesn't want, that presence it can ignore GDPR.
No. Tea can have no legal presence in the EU, but if it collects data from people in the EU at the time of collection, then it is caught be GDPR. It would be offering services to people in the EU in this case, and so has to deal with their laws, including privacy and consumer protections.
Steam tried this stuff on in Australia too, saying it had no presence there, but still sold games to Australians. In particular, they didn't want to honour Australia's consumer rights laws regarding refunds. They fought hard in the courts and lost, and it improved steam for almost everyone.
Big tech try on these jurisdiction arguments all the time, but they've repeatedly failed where you are selling goods to, or providing services to, people in those jurisdictions. The US does the same thing. If you sell or provide services to someone in XX state, you need to abide by the consumer laws (and maybe privacy if it is a state like CA) of that state.
This is one of the reasons paypal and Escrow.com have had a competitive advantage. It is hard getting money transmission / escrow licenses in all 50 states like they do. There are many such examples.
Oh, it may be in violation of the GDPR, but European law doesn't have jurisdiction in the US. It literally doesn't matter unless they don't want to give up their European paid subscriptions.
Valve did not want to give up its Australian income stream, which is why it went to court.
Unrestricted by foreign law, yes. Would you be in favor of having US law enforced against you? It bewilders me why anyone would want more of this nonsense in the world instead of less.
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.
US law is _already_ enforced upon me. Banks regularly ask if you are a US citizen, or subject to the IRS in any way. The US affirms at every step the extraterritoriality of its harmful laws and attempts to use their pathetic excuse of "free speech" to defend multimillion dollar companies evading taxes in my country while damaging democracy. The US imposes its definition of copyright to the world, destroying access to culture and knowledge to billions.
Needless to say, I am very happy about making the US eat shit.
This is not true. Like, (almost) at all. (There are a few tiny exceptions, for instance, if an EU national commits child sexual abuse overseas, they can be prosecuted for it in the EU)
Two Germans shooting each other in Australia break Australian law, but not German law.
Ah yes, the notorious extraterritorial "right to be forgotten". Whereby the EU military dispatches its special forces to smash up computers in foreign data centers.
No, that isn't true. To the contrary actually, the GDPR applies to anyone on European soil, even US citizens. When you're on American soil, you fall under American legislation.
That's not really analogous to revenge porn laws (where the “revenege" part is both non-literal—the actual condition is lack of consent—and refers to a special circumstance that makes what is normally legal, illegal, not an enhanced penalty for existing offense.)
But if your proposed concept of “revenge libel” laws are just, as you say an added penalty for a subset of existing libel offenses, then while they might add more severe sanctions, they don't change the scope of what is prohibited, so they wouldn't change the calculus on whether anything is illegal.
Nah, man. They wanted to go on a date. There is risk involved, and implied consent.
This isn't any different from a friend sharing details of their date with somebody they know (including pictures). If it's a bad date, I'm sure the tone of the conversation would be different (and might include "stay away from this person")
So totally free, unless you criticise the empero… err, Trump or the government, of course. Or if you're against Israeli settlements. Or in favour of humane treatment of the People of Palestine. Or have information on the customers of Jeffrey Epstein. Or…
You can say all those things. Will some people think you're an idiot and refuse to do business with you? Sure. But you're not going to be arrested for things you say in the US unless you're making threats.
They violated their visas by virtue of having the wrong opinion. At the time they voiced this opinion, there was no indication this would result in the revocation of their visas, so there's that.
Also, I was under the impression the constitution referred to everyone on American soil equally when it comes to the fundamental civil rights, which includes freedom of speech, the right to due process, and the right to gather; yet, several people have been detained, without due process, for their speech, or for peaceful assembly.
Again, there's a big difference between being charged with a crime and having your visa revoked. If you're in the US on a visa you're a guest of the country and only have the right to be here as long as do (and not do) the things you agreed to when you applied for the visa.
Again, these students first had their visa revoked, and were then detained without a lawyer, and taken away to an unknown location.
The constitution protects free speech, regardless of citizenship. Having their visa revoked for inconvenient speech is problematic in itself, but using that as a ploy to strip people of their fundamental rights is completely unacceptable.
That's how the visa system works. When you lose your visa, you get deported.
The constitution does not protect non-visa-holding people from deportation regardless of the reason the visa was revoked. In this case the visa was revoked because they were supporting a foreign terrorist organization, which is something they promised not to do when applying for a visa. This is not something that needs to be proven in court unless the government is filing criminal charges.
Nobody's rights are being stripped. They're simply being forced to leave the country. They do not have a right to be here.
Let me a bit more precise. I'm not claiming that the US actually always follows its own standards, or that there aren't authoritarian oversteps of power -- there are.
I'm just saying that the American definition of freedom of speech (whether the authorities follow it in practice or not) is unusually expansive. Edge cases like hate speech against particular ethnic groups, public insults, open support for terrorist organizations, etc. are much more likely to be legally protected in the US than in other countries, even including other liberal democracies.
That used to be the case, and I agree in principle. With the current administration, however, this is no longer true. Freedom of speech stops being free speech if the government detains people and revokes visas for having a certain opinion, tries to dictate the curriculum at universities, forces trans people to their birth gender, acts against lawyers with the wrong clients, excludes unwanted media from press conferences or sues them altogether… this list goes on for a while.
Donald Trump is a danger to the fundamental rights granted by the constitution, and the republicans are assisting him in tearing it down.
Okay, but we're getting a little off topic. The point I was responding to was about whether it's legal to share information in a totally apolitical scenario where normal laws presumably still apply.
Well I'm not American but I feel like all I have read for the last 8 months has been American organisations and American people criticising Trump, the US government and Israel. I am not aware of penalties for these orgs or people, do you have examples?
lol no it doesn't. american freedom is a bit of a joke but it's par for the course in the USA to make shit up and then defend it.
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.
But sharing *facts* about other people is potentially defamatory speech (in the American context). There's a not-at-all small nuance here: when you make concrete allegations about your personal experiences, you're not sharing an opinion—not sharing your subjective reaction to publicly-known information—rather you're introducing novel facts, provable objective facts, into the discussion—your version of those facts. And that comes with genuine legal risks.
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.
I thought, as a practical matter, it's on the person alleging slander or libel to prove falsehood?
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.
Hypothetically, if I said "firefax murdered an underage prostitute and then sexually violated the underage prostitute's corpse in 2018 and was never caught, I witnessed it happen and tried to report it but the police refused to even open an investigation, firefax is a dangerous predator and should not be trusted", and you lost your job because of that, should you be the one with the burden to prove that never happened?
We are talking about what is the law in a specific country, not what “should” be the law. Also, the bizarrely graphic description is out of place here.
It's a visceral thought experiment, intended to instill a sense of bewilderment at what being falsely accused actually feels like to someone who seems to offer a normative assertion that privileges bad-faith accusers, without actually causing any of the harm of a real false accusation. That is topically relevant and experientially informative while being restrained enough to not be actually harmful.
It’s complicated in the US. The rules of thumb as I understand them are:
1) The truth is an absolute defense against libel claims, but it is a defense, so you must prove the truth of your claims.
2) Statements of opinion (or that a “reasonable person” would understand to be opinion) are with few exceptions protected. “Firefax is a rapist” is likely to not be considered a statement of opinion. “Firefax is a creepy asshole” likely is. “Firefax is a sexual predator” is probably going to be in a grey area and context and damages will be relevant.
3) The more “public” of a person you are, the harder it is to win a libel case, even the statements were false. For example, let’s say it turns out both that there is some “Epstein List” describing clients and their activities, and also that it turns out Trump doesn’t appear anywhere in that list. Trump is such a public figure (both as a celebrity and as the POTUS) that he would be extremely unlikely to win any libel cases against the internet randos confidently asserting he’s on the list even though that statement would have been a statement of fact, and would have been false.
4) A key part of the “opinion” grey area is whether you imply knowledge of heretofore unknown facts, or your relying on publicly available data. Internet randos might not lose a case, but someone like Elon Musk might if they said something like “I’ve seen the case files, Trump is definitely on that list and has done some sick things”. This is because Musk could reasonably be believed to have had privileged access to the information in question and have non-public facts they are basing their statements on. Internet randos on the other hand are largely going to be considered making their statements on the back of publicly known facts (e.g. photos, business connections, public actions and statements) and general “vibes”
> But sharing facts about other people is potentially defamatory speech
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.
Devil's advocate, but how is saying someone is an unreliable romantic partner going to financially hurt someone? Maybe the reason I haven't had success in the policy arena is because I've been too kind, given recent events :-)
I'm not sure, it depends case to case and what the court thinks. I think, generally, if you can prove it directly caused you to lose lots of money then you can make an argument.
Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying and intending to hurt men, because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women?
A few days ago a video leaked of a woman riding in a Mexican taxi, who was demanding the driver went faster. He refused because it'd be dangerous, and she immediately started threatening to report him as a harasser to the police. She even said he had to speed up or else the police would be waiting for him when they got there. She didn't realize her whole conversation was recorded on camera.
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.
"A lot of men" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
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 the time a man has hit his 40’s, it is exceptionally uncommon he hasn’t seen someone hit with a false rape claim - or had one himself - by a vindictive ex. Or has been threatened with (or directly attacked) with physical violence.
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.
The problem is that you're equating the wide range of violence against women with a specific kind of violence against men by calling both "bad things", insinuating those are even remotely comparable. They are not. 90% of rape victims are female. In the US alone, every 68 seconds, a woman is sexually assaulted.
After the big war, some Germans were quick to point out that their people had suffered when they were displaced from the land they occupied in Poland, for example, and that "both sides had suffered". I assume you're also incapable of understanding why the victims of the Nazi regime were completely aghast by that?
> But it sure does (or should!) make anyone with a brain question hyperbolic claims of abuse or violence without actual evidence.
What do you suggest to do instead? Sexual violence is often a crime with only the perpetrator(s) and the victim as witnesses. In most cases, rape doesn't leave persistent traces. Rape victims tend to be in shock, however, and often need time to process what happened. Your suggestion seems to be that we should question these claims?
Judging these cases correctly is incredibly complicated, and claims of wide swaths of men falling prey to abusive women don't really help anyone affected.
There is a reason ‘he said, she said’ is widely known as the shittiest type of situation, eh?
Yes, we should question those claims, and any others. Or everyone who wants to be shitty will do it via that route. It’s basic shitty human behavior.
That it screws actual victims is why people gaming the system should be punished.
But not challenging these claims just makes more victims too. And eventually people will just tune out accusations, because the shittiness has gotten too pervasive. And then the predators/shitty humans will get be doing more actual rape eh? Which is terrible.
This is why it’s also prudent to be very careful who anyone is alone with, favor video recording of public spaces, etc. as well. Because the best way to avoid a situation is to make it as difficult as possible for the situation to occur, and minimize the chances of any ambiguity. Which is also shitty for everyone.
Personally, I also don’t trust the stats because I’ve seen many (5+) women retcon clearly consensual behavior (that they were even bragging about before!) into ‘he raped me’ when someone tried to shame them for it later, or there was some leverage they could get out of it. I had one who literally admitted to me when I investigated that she was doing it to punish the guy for refusing to date her later. Another was fine until she went home and her mom gave her crap about her dating behavior, and then all the sudden it was rape. Until we started to interview her for her story, and then she admitted it was consensual.
I very much believe actual rapes and SA’s occur. I personally have literally never seen an accusation for rape or SA that stood up to even the lightest scrutiny, within the environments I’ve been responsible for. And not because I was trying to avoid them!
The joys of being a manager of mixed sex groups eh?
If we could figure out the actual truth of these situations, then we could punish actual offenders and not constantly be in this BS situation.
I do. Not as an indictment of women but an indictment of social apps. Apps like this are way too hard to moderate, manage and verify. They quickly get swarmed by bad actors and misused. Again, not because women don't have genuine safety concerns in the dating world but because apps are not a viable way to manage those concerns.
Some social problems just don't have technological solutions.
You know the answer to that is zero. There is no viable system a company, let alone a small unfunded startup, could use to verify the identity of the reporters let alone guarantee the trustworthiness of the account.
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.
I'm sorry and I'll be voted down for this, but I do think that it will attract plenty of fibbing and deliberate or not-so-deliberate stretching of the truth. Anyone who is rejected tends to be a bit angry about it. In this case, women who are ghosted can say whatever they want.
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.
> Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying
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.
We grant a tremendous amount of leeway and power to accusations made by women against men in society today. There are always honest people using things for their intended purpose. Though they are also dishonest people using things for their own ulterior motives.
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.
So all I need to do to mark another guy (who might be, for example, competing for a job I want, or a certain woman's attention) as a rapist on a platform that's used by people in the location this guy lives in in the US is a (fake) female driver's license, a photo of the guy in question, and a name?
coolcoolcool. I'm sure that neverever gets abused horrifically.
That doesn't apply when you publish information for broad consumption. Then it becomes libel. People need to realize that posting on a site where you can reasonably expect that your words may be consumed by the masses makes you a publisher. That comes with responsibilities and is not protected the same way as an individual's personal speech.
It's not defamation if it's true. Why do you think women warning other women about rapey and stalker men are mostly lies? Even if it's only 5% of men, wouldn't the discussion focus on that dangerous 5% over persecuting the innocent 95%, as a matter of self-preservation?
An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. While it's controversial for men to be concerned about women as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm.
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.
Maybe it's different now, I have no clue, but I'm in my 40's now and don't make a habit of hanging out with 20 year olds.
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.
> An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm.
The same hypothetical 5% can inflict harm to multiple women, that's why multiple women and girls complained about Epstein and Trump.
What was leaked was women's personal data, like driver's licenses. What they shared with each other was their experiences with men who sexually assaulted them or stalked them and their names, not the men's personal data.
Men's driver licenses were not distributed online. Only women's driver licenses were distributed online.
I'm not familiar with this app, but surely those accusations of sexual assault are only useful to other users of the men are sufficiently well identified?
The article says that what gets shared with the app is a picture of the man, and it's not just "those who sexually assaulted them or stalked them" but anyone they want feedback about.
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!
There are soo many examples from the US showing why GDPR is a good thing: Clearview AI (biometric mass surveillance, essentially "search the internet by face"), car manufacturers collecting and selling location data, phone companies collecting and selling location data, ISPs collecting and selling browsing behavior, companies running mass surveillance on license plates and selling the data to law enforcement and really anyone who pays, some DNA sequencing related abuses that I don't remember the details of, all the data collected by the ad "ecosystem" (note that this still happens in GDPR-land because enforcement is lacking), this, ...
In this future that you want me to imagine, do you imagine, that I'm imagining that I am poor or I am rich? Because oh man, I didn't have much luck at the lottery or at blackjack or craps or startups or crypto, but I'm sure, this time, AI is gonna help me strike it rich!
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.
Every couple years someone tries this and it immediately turns into a cesspool because no matter the good intentions of the makers, it attracts the worst kind of person as active users.
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.
These kinds of apps are already in existence across many cities in the world in the form of informal, invite-only WhatsApp and Telegram groups.
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.
"invite-only" is key because it requires a trust relationship, if not directly then through minimal degrees of separation. While not perfect they can basically work while apps for the general population cannot because there is no trust between the users.
Indeed. This trust is a critical point. The invitation mechanism is a web of trust. Not infallible but better than these apps that try to centralize that through identification.
> 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.
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.
Based on some of the things I've seen in my professional and personal circles, I'd say there's much more than a chance, and the level of potential distortion is probably much greater, with more consequences, than some are acknowledging.
There needs to be a startup accelerator or VC that solely focuses on recycled ideas. We could have an app that gathers strangers for dinners, one for reviewing people, and so on. Since all of these gained traction at some point, the idea would be you get 1-2 quick puffs of these discarded cigarette butts before selling or shutting down. Just vibe code it, go viral, collect some subscriber fees, then close due to whatever reason.
This looks like a slam book. Or that’s what girls called it when I was in high school. Basically just a place where you write mean things about people you don’t like. And those people don’t get to see it.
Providing a platform for defamation and other tortious speech is generally legally protected under §230. They still have to respond to court orders and DMCA requests, though. This is how sites like Kiwi Farms remain online. That said, commercial apps can sometimes be sued under defective product laws.
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 is more a question of English than law. Slanderous statements are false by definition.
There are countries where "false defamation" could be a term of art. Japan, for instance, where spreading rumors about someone that hurt their reputation is actionable even if those rumors are true. If your boss is having an affair, for instance, and you tell all your coworkers, he can successfully sue you.
A gray area in my eyes. As a father, I think it's good that my daughter uses the app.
You only need to look at the statistics to see how many women are killed by their male partners every year.
It's harmful to spread this kind of fear. Statistically it's less than 0.05% of women die because they are killed by their partner. This puts a stigma on men in general as some sort of dangerous savages.
As a man, I find it absurd and even dangerous to not attach some stigma to men. That you feel the need to invoke "dangerous savages" is maybe your own prerogative, but by any sober and fact-based analysis it is indisputable that women are justified in acting cautiously when dealing with strange men.
Most violence is perpetrated by men. If you're only response to that hard, cold fact is some stat about infanticide, maybe you're not honestly grappling with the issue.
And yet domestic violence is equally done by men and women, except that most men don't report the abuse because of people like you who act like it doesn't happen. It's disappointing.
You bring up fact based analyses. Let's see what they have to say.
> Over two hundred studies found that men and women perpetrate intimate partner violence at roughly equivalent rates, depending on where the samples are drawn from, and what level of violence is identified. (Dutton and Nicholls, 2005).
I'm justified in acting cautiously when dealing with strange pit bulls, too. That isn't the same as saying pit bulls deserve to be stigmatized. Or I don't think it is.
I think the problem is not the statement, but the conclusion.
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.
The statistics is a bit more complex and nuanced than giving straight answers. Studies looking at any form of violence in partner relationships shows both women and men having equal amount. When looking at physical violence, especially those that lead to people being charged with a crime, men are over-represented in heterosexual relationships.
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.
The technical term of "any form of violence" seems to be Partner Abuse, and the definition is: "violence refers to behaviour within an intimate relationship that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including acts of physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours."
The primary motives are to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.
The idea that women are unable of violent behavior, or immune to wanting to take revenge for being emotional hurt or stressed, seems utterly unlikely. Especially young adults who might lack the tools and experience to avoid falling into violent responses.
To quote a different finding: Eight studies directly compared men and women in the power/control motive and subjected their findings to statistical analyses. Three reported no significant gender differences and one had mixed findings. One paper found that women were more motivated to perpetrate violence as a result of power/control than were men, and three found that men were more motivated; however, gender differences were weak
Asking if "men risk as much as women" is a very different question however. If a woman throws a knife at a man, and a man hits a woman in the face, who carry the highest risk? Statically, the fist is going to do significant more damage on average than the knife, as throwing a knife (especially a non-throwing knife), hitting the target, and creating damage is fairly unlikely for a non-proficient attacker. If the attacks was recorded on camera/witnessed, one would be an attack with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill, and the other would be physical assault.
The point is that partner violence is a complex problem, which only simple aspect being that both women and men are humans.
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.
Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?
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.
> Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?
That's the main argument of the grandparent post. If you're missing that then you're not really responding to what they said.
They went into significant detail so I feel like trying to reword it myself would be worse than suggesting you read the post again.
> 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.
Nah. Root cause analysis is entirely different from risk analysis. This is about risk analysis. If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence? That's not the time to worry about why and how to fix society.
> maybe men behavior is different from women behavior
Maybe it is! But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post. Or you need to say the data is wrong. But you can't just dismiss it as being defensive.
> That's the main argument of the grandparent post.
Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.
> If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence?
I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent. You need something more. In this case, I think it's a culture that implies that violent men are manly and successful, which is present in the manosphere. Because there is no such culture (I guess you can find anecdotical case, far from being as common as the manosphere) that implies that women beating men is somehow "womenly", I doubt it implies that tall women will beat men at the same rate.
> But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post.
All the data adds up, everything is pretty well predicted by this model. Not sure which data you think this model does not explain (unless you think that somehow this model implies 0%-100%, which is of course not the case). On the other hand, I doubt anyone has ever proven that being taller in the relationship is really a strong causal factor (and not just correlation, as the manosphere is also into going to the gym) (but happy to get links if you have some).
> Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.
You never made it clear that you understood the argument, because you went straight from "Not sure what is your point" to "Why would it be". That doesn't look like a request for more convincing, that looks like you never considered it.
> I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent.
What. Not every dating relationship involves violence either. We're talking about what's more likely here.
Also children and dates are different in so many ways that even ignoring that factor this doesn't disprove the argument at all.
> Not sure which data you think this model does not explain
If the root cause is culture encouraging men to be physically violent, why would the total amount of physical violence be the same in gay relationships, especially lesbian ones?
I'm simply trying to have an enjoyable conversation where we all learn and understand each other. I was just saying "I'm not convinced by this, but maybe I did not understood" to avoid assuming incorrectly, and to invite non-confrontationally to clarify if I'm wrong and provide more arguments.
I'm not saying that the children example means that "every bigger persons will be violent towards a smaller person", I'm trying to explain that the children example means that "violence is not the result of being bigger, it's the result of the individual propensity to be violent, which itself depends a lot of the individual 'world view'".
What I call here 'world view' is how the individual understand the world, their role in this world, what they can or cannot do, ... This is something built based on their parent education, but also their personal experience, what they absorb from the ambient culture and how they identify with different societal messages.
Such influence is taken as obvious in plenty of places: we don't question concepts like "different countries have different cultures and therefore people act differently", or "the education that this person has received had an impact in the way they act now", or ...
I find strange that, when it is a discussion that we can frame as "men vs women", these things that we immediately considered impactful in other situations are suddenly considered as totally non-impactful in this context.
Because of that, it feels unrealistic to pretend that women will obviously be as violent if they were stronger than men and that the only thing that stops them is them being smaller.
> If the root cause is culture encouraging men to be physically violent, why would the total amount of physical violence be the same in gay relationships, especially lesbian ones?
I've mentioned that (when I've said "if indeed it is cultural, it implies that different sub-culture may have different ways of acting"). The propensity of violence depends on the "world view", which itself depends on personal experience, what is the message the society send to the individual their role is, ...
In the case of lesbians:
1) I don't think we can easily say "it's the same". Some studies even say it's more, but then, how do you explain that with your model? But looking into it, it looks like the consensus is that it is a difficult study and that we don't have a good statistical significance: the consensus seems to be that concluding "it's the same" is not scientific right now, all we can say is "it may be the same, but it may also not be the same, we don't know yet".
2) The life experience, the social message they receive, the relationship dynamics, ... are quite different in lesbian couples and in heterosexual couples. And all of this affects the propensity to violence. I can understand that a group where the members grew up in a society that sends the message their sexual attraction is "wrong" or "deviant" does not have, for example, the same self-esteem than a group where it is not the case. It is not fair to pretend that lesbian couples have the same background and the same situation than heterosexual couples.
So, in the case of lesbians, the data you provide is not challenging my model: it can easily be that men may be more violent in heterosexual relationship because of sociocultural message (such as "getting angry is the manly way to deal with frustration") or sociocultural role (such as "men are the breadwinner and are focusing more on their career, so they have more pressure and snap differently than women"), while lesbians may be more violent because of their sociocultural message inside their own subculture (maybe? Maybe for example "in a lesbian couple, we expect to have a butch one and a dominated one") or their life experience (maybe? Maybe for example "low self-esteem of both the victim and the abuser leads to a relationship dynamic that facilitate violence").
I'm also interested to have more information about your view on the phenomenon like the manosphere. I don't think we have a "female manosphere" that promotes the same culture of violence towards the partner (I'm sure there are cases, but that is not at all the same order of magnitude in popularity and mainstreamness). Sure, the people who really fall for the manosphere rhetoric is a minority, but they are the extreme of a Gaussian curve that indicate that the mean value is not at the same place for men and for women. If it's the case, is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all (and if it has no impact at all, why people who defend that it has no impact will also be worried about "the image of the men" when it comes to talking about violence done by men? Why would be one message harmless and the other dangerous?)
> I'm simply trying to have an enjoyable conversation where we all learn and understand each other. I was just saying "I'm not convinced by this, but maybe I did not understood" to avoid assuming incorrectly, and to invite non-confrontationally to clarify if I'm wrong and provide more arguments.
That's reasonable as a goal but I implore you to be clearer next time. You didn't address the evidence they gave so I couldn't tell if you understood at all or if you though other evidence was more compelling.
> I'm trying to explain that the children example means that "violence is not the result of being bigger, it's the result of the individual propensity to be violent, which itself depends a lot of the individual 'world view'".
I don't think that's good enough evidence for such a strong claim. Not at all enough to say the size factor is flat-out disproven by it.
And overall I do think world view is important, but I bet physical size is a significant factor too unless the evidence above is extra bunk.
> I find strange that, when it is a discussion that we can frame as "men vs women", these things that we immediately considered impactful in other situations are suddenly considered as totally non-impactful in this context.
I'm not saying totally non impactful but it's unclear what percentage.
> Because of that, it feels unrealistic to pretend that women will obviously be as violent if they were stronger than men and that the only thing that stops them is them being smaller.
The statistics given are not based on pretending.
> it looks like the consensus is that it is a difficult study and that we don't have a good statistical significance
That is a much better argument.
> while lesbians may be more violent because of their sociocultural message inside their own subculture (maybe? Maybe for example "in a lesbian couple, we expect to have a butch one and a dominated one") or their life experience (maybe? Maybe for example "low self-esteem of both the victim and the abuser leads to a relationship dynamic that facilitate violence").
Edited this line to make it clearer: Maybe but looking at that level of complication still makes it harder to evaluate man versus woman in any random relationship, especially those very individual life experience factors that can affect anyone.
> I'm also interested to have more information about your view on the phenomenon like the manosphere. [...] is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all
I'm not sure how much it impacts violence in particular, shrug. But whatever effect it has is divided by the relative rarity of believers.
> If it's the case, is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all (and if it has no impact at all, why people who defend that it has no impact will also be worried about "the image of the men" when it comes to talking about violence done by men? Why would be one message harmless and the other dangerous?)
Listen, I haven't heard this debate before, and I'm not taking part in it, but your comparison here isn't reasonable. Asking if one message increases violence and asking if the other message hurts someone's image are completely different things. If someone says no and yes respectively there's no hypocrisy.
> but I implore you to be clearer next time. You didn't address the evidence they gave
I did: I even quoted that part in my previous comment: this part is indeed in the first comment (the sentence starting with " Secondly, if indeed it is cultural, ..." that explains why the data does not prove the conclusion they proposed). But it does not matter, I think we cleared this.
> I don't think that's good enough evidence for such a strong claim.
The children example is not an evidence for a claim.
If you say "I only saw black cats, so all cats are black", I can answer "I'm not convinced, maybe you just saw black cats but non-black cats exist, after all, other animals, like dogs, horses, cows, ... have different color". You now say "the fact that dogs have different colors is not a proof". Of course it's not, nobody pretended it was. I just explain why the initial claim is not convincing. I'm not the one making any claim, I'm just saying that this claim is just a guess and that there are different models that explain the situation as accurately (or maybe even more accurately, as they are also compatible with other behaviors, while the presented model still need to explain why some mechanisms exist in some situation and suddenly disappear in others).
> Maybe but looking at that level of complication still makes it harder to evaluate man versus woman in any random relationship
And so is the reality: it is hard to evaluate man vs woman in any random relationship. Is your point that it is not the case? Or that we should reject models that imply that just because you prefer models more convenient? "Sure, quantum mechanism is interesting, but it makes things more complicated, so let's just pretend it is incorrect"
> But whatever effect it has is divided by the relative rarity of believers.
That is not at all what I say. I explain it in the ellipsis you removed from your quote. I'm saying that the extreme of the distribution shows that we cannot simply assume that the mean is at the same place. For example, women lives older than men, and you can also see it by looking at the very old persons: they are extremely rare, but yet, women are more common.
I don't say at all that violence against women is due to manosphere, the same way I'm not saying that if you ignore people older than 100 years, you will not see any life-expectancy difference between men and women.
What I was saying is that, culturally, "men behaving towards women in ways that may lead to violence" is more assimilated as normal in our society than "women behaving towards men in the same ways". The manosphere is the extreme, as is "people older than 115 year old", but the fact that the manosphere is only about "men towards women" and that there no significant equivalent "women towards men" shows that the average assimilation of default behaviors are different.
> but your comparison here isn't reasonable
I'm not comparing the two.
What I don't understand is that on one hand, the claim is that violence is mainly due to a "mechanical fixed parameter" such as the size of the person and that societal messaging has no significant impact.
But that on the other hand, these people are also saying that it is very bad that we hurt the image of men, because societal message has consequence.
> "I'm not convinced, maybe you just saw black cats but non-black cats exist, after all, other animals, like dogs, horses, cows, ... have different color".
Well the actual argument wasn't nearly as extreme as "only black fur", and a better (but still messy) analogy would be you citing one other animal and we don't have good stats for any other kinds of animal either. That's part of why I'm saying the child example isn't very good at affecting convincedness.
Also you used the word "proves", I feel like if you say X proves Y then it's not weird for me to call that a "claim". I don't think "I'm not the one making any claim" is valid here; you're responding to the original claim with arguments that include your own claims.
> there are different models that explain the situation as accurately
I'd say that so far none of the models here reach "very convincing" for all the data at hand. They're all big maybes.
> I'm saying that the extreme of the distribution shows that we cannot simply assume that the mean is at the same place.
Well even with a completely isolated size factor, the means are different. I don't think anyone was saying that.
And sure the distributions might have different shapes. There's a lot of analysis here that hasn't been done.
> What I don't understand is that on one hand, the claim is that violence is mainly due to a "mechanical fixed parameter" such as the size of the person and that societal messaging has no significant impact.
That's too binary. One thing can be the main effect while another is still quite significant. Like 75/25 just to toss out a number.
The places I've used "prove" are in totally different contexts that the context in which you pretended I was claiming some proof.
For the rest, it feels like you are moving the goalpost. The initial discussion was about the fact that if there is an impact of the societal messaging, it is smart to acknowledge that (and I insisted that it should still be done carefully). If now you are saying 75/25, then you are still saying that the societal messaging has an impact. Therefore I still think it's smart to acknowledge it.
(I understand the objection that it may be too dangerous, but unfortunately you did not go into this direction. I come back on that on my last paragraph.)
Why this impression?
Your initial main argument was initially resting on "lesbian couples have the same amount of violence", but this argument does not make sense if it is 75/25: if there is a 25% effect, what does observing the same rate means? If you observe exactly the same rate, does it mean that we have a societal impact that somehow canceled itself, or does it means that in fact the "natural rate of violence from women" is less than men (the exact thing you pretend this data proves impossible), but that the societal impact increases it up to reach the same value? If indeed you believe in the 75/25, then the "same rate amongst lesbians" cannot prove anything. And on top of that, now, you also need to justify why it is 75/25 and not 85/15 or 65/35, and the whole argument seems to be "it's my gut feeling" (not that it is bad in itself, but then you cannot use that as basis to pretend that the lesbian data proves something).
I can be wrong, but because of that, it feels to me that you were not really agreeing to 75/25 at the beginning of the discussion (otherwise you would not have used the "lesbian rate" argument as you had), but now that the discussion advanced, you are making some concessions but still try to find some reasons why the conclusion you prefer is still valid. If my impression is correct, it means that instead of looking at the arguments first and reaching the conclusion based on the arguments, you start with the conclusion that you prefer, and build arguments in order to defend this conclusion.
(and I understand that you instinctively prefer the conclusion where we avoid acknowledging that there is something specific to men, it's not a comfortable prospect)
I've mentioned that we could have discussed around the danger of acknowledging. Unfortunately, if now we start discussing that, it will just reinforce my feeling that you jump to another thread now that one ran its course because you want to defend the conclusion you like.
So, yeah, I guess there is not much more to add here.
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.
Calling it "extremely idiosyncratic" is not indicative of reality:
> 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]
You misunderstood my comment and instead gave examples that further support the idea that race relations in America are unique and particular to our history and geography. That's why race statistics in the US are not well-suited for cross-cultural comparison, let alone for drawing gargantuan conclusions about inherent racial traits (as racists are often looking to do).
The risk of females being murdered by an intimate partner is five times higher than for males. And murder is just the very end of the spectrum.
And by definition, calling out men, is not racism.
Are there other groups that are 5x more likely to commit murder? Even if there are, IMO we shouldn't judge every member of that group for the actions of a small minority
It's better to think in terms of overall life damage and "quality of life years lost". I think it's very debatable which side loses more from getting involved in relationships.
In my opinion, it's dangerous to consider absolute numbers alone in this context. Saying something like, "Less than 0.02% of paragliders die because of the sport," can be misleading. When nn reality, the chance of dying from paragliding is 1000 times higher than in football. When I choose my next hobby, this information is very useful.
Statistically that is a rather small number. But if we take the number of women in say, America, a web search says 334.9 million. 0.05% of that is 167,450. That is quite a lot of women being killed by their partner.
According to the UNODC[1], in 2023, the rate of all murders of women in the US was 0.00205%. (2.05 per 100,000) Partner violence appears to account for ~34% of violence against women[2] (but vs. 6% for men), so that would be 0.697 per 100k or ~0.0007%, or ~1190 women/yr in the US[3]. Assuming I've done the math right… the risk is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than what you came up with.
> 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.
> when you cut the stat this way, it seems like men are wildly dangerous creeps.
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.
I don't know were you have this numbers from, but in 2021 34% of women were killed by partner and 76% of women where killed by a known person (family, friends, colleges, partner) [1].
Your wording here is clumsy. You're saying that 34% of the adult female population was murdered by their partner. I'm assuming you meant female murder victims and not women in general?
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.
I don't want to imply that someone tried to find the smallest possible number in order to deliberately misunderstand my comment, but we are still in the context of the dating app.
I keep seeing the defense for Tea as an app for women’s safety, which is of course a valid concern. Wouldn’t it make more sense for a service to exist, like some kind of enforcement service provided by the government, where others can report safety concerns and that service goes and does something about it legally?
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
> Wouldn’t it make more sense for a service to exist, like some kind of enforcement service provided by the government, where others can report safety concerns and that service goes and does something about it legally?
Online men-dominated forums often dislike and feel personally attacked by people talking about sexual abuse/harassment done by other men. I guess they immediately imagine themselves being falsely accused of such acts, rather than being a woman that is attacked.
I think groups in general feel personally attacked by things that attack people on the basis of their immutable group characteristics. Notably women dislike and feel attacked by unqualified statements like "women are crazy" or calling someone a "karen". Black people dislike and feel attacked when people talk about "ghetto trash" or "welfare queens".
Sure any individual discussion about an individual might justifiably refer to that person as "crazy" or "ghetto trash". But the nature of online spaces, and the nature of the public discourse that tends to bring these phrases and discussions into the public eye very quickly starts painting people with broad brushes.
People also feel attacked because often times discussions tend to confuse useful rhetorical devices for conveying a point with justification for a behavior that has harmful impacts on the broader group. For example, it was pretty common to here the "bowl of M&Ms where one M&M is poisoned" analogy in the height of the "Me Too" movement. It's a useful rhetorical device for explaining why someone would fell cautious about a strange man, and why they wouldn't start from a position of trust. But it's also a terrible way of generally treating men in your life, and a terrible broad philosophy for organizations and governments to follow.
And we know this rhetorical device makes bad policy and at large is harmful to innocent people because another time in recent history when that analogy was really popular was immediately after the Sept 11 attacks when talking about Muslims in general and immigrants from Muslim countries. Surely no one would find it strange that Muslims might dislike and feel personally attacked by "people talking about crimes and terrorism done by other Muslims" in the same way that many online spaces talk about "sexual abuse/harassment done by other men". Surely we wouldn't be surprised if people felt attacked or disliked an app for sharing anonymous and private information about suspicious Muslims right? Or let's say someone noticed that black people are statistically 2x as likely relative to their population to be the offender of a violent crime[1]. You'd reasonably expect people to be bothered by an app that excluded black people from signing up and was entirely about strangers providing un-verified experiences with black people under the premise of keeping people safe.
Ultimately, people are bad at statistics and really bad at understanding the degree to which a small minority of individuals can affect a large majority of people by virtue of repeat offending. So it can be true both that lots of people have completely valid awful experiences with members of a given broad group, and that members of that group feel unfairly maligned when discussion about those experiences paints with broad, unqualified strokes.
Women talking about their history sexual violence do not attack you or group you are a part of. Bringing some of these normalised actions to light do not attack you unless you’re a rapist yourself.
With a statement like: “men have caused countless wars in the world and created an incredible amount of suffering and injustice as a result.” No “normal” man would feel addressed and say “But women ...”
You are probably unaware of unintended consequences enabled by this app - many women use it to find bad boys they feel attracted to due to some brokenness in female psyche. So you'll get public outrage on one hand and private DMs on the other from them, based on how bad you are described/vetted by other women on the app.
If you had a son, would you think it's good spiteful women from his past were labeling him some kind of abuser on TEA when he has no way to know these allegations even exist?
Not only that, I think they're forfeit their Section 230 protections since they're exercising editorial control by excluding males from the platform. So they'd be directly liable for any defamation they publish on their platform.
It would be in Apple and Google’s best interest to pull these apps immediately. Multiple Supreme Court justices have indicated an interest in narrowing the breadth of section 230 immunity. This app, structured entirely around effecting the reputation of private individuals, provides a relatively clean case to do so. It’s not a stretch that the app could be considered a ‘developer in part’ of the content it hosts, and thus lose section 230 protection.
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 continues to confuse me that the publisher/distributor distinction that section 230 was meant to remove (created by prior Federal court decisions) gets so frequently interpreted as if section 230 had been intended to establish it.
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.
Thanks for posting the link. I had read that before and forgot.
I think sometimes confusion about Section 230 maybe points to some legal soft spots.
I think there's a trend — good or bad — for courts to see websites as accountable for users' activities on the site when those activities are systematic and collectively illegal or jeopardized, when the website is seen as encouraging the activity.
It's not hard for me to imagine a court deciding that the intrinsic nature of the website encourages systematic libel, and is therefore is somehow involved in the creation of post content.
Even more specifically, I'm not sure the "good faith" clause of Section 230 even applies to something like Tea in the case of libel, should libel be there.
Now, actually showing libel is another thing, but that's also easier for me to imagine today than even a year ago, especially in the presence of a data breach where posters are exposed.
I guess I don't see Tea as being held legally responsible for anything about the content of user posts, in the US at least, for the reasons outlined in that article. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it did happen.
> I had no idea that it was effectively unconditional protection.
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.
Because they seem to want it to work that way and seem to think that by spreading the misinformation that it will somehow change the way the law is interpreted.
We need to stop allowing companies that are not directly engaged in financial services to request government IDs.
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.
There is no "secure tool", there is no secure way to verify ID online right now, none of these companies can be trusted to do it properly. Just last week a bunch of my personal info was implicated in a breach of a background check company who supposedly knew what they were doing.
A private way of doing this is absolutely 100% viable with some cryptography and government support. Apparently nobody gives enough of a fuck to even try.
As for the UK's new 'porn ID' law, people are going to die. People will take their own lives when their porn browsing habits are inevitably leaked. Private companies cannot be trusted to keep their hand out of the cookie jar, they WILL link peoples' histories to their real IDs.
A secure Know Your Customer API would be a useful service for Apple and Google to provide to developers. It could scan the ID and reveal individual pieces of information with permission to the application or multiple applications. Forgive me if it already exists and this app just wasn’t using it.
You are going to show your ID to at least one foreign company with dubious data collection history, because the government will eventually force it on you.
There are verifiable credentials protocols which would let a site to check something (and prove that they checked it) without de-anonymizing the user.
It can be done with fairly basic cryptography. But the infrastructure around it would grow only if there's a demand. Otherwise people go with lowest denominator.
This. Appropriate regulation should make this an offense punishable by a large fine. There is almost no consequence to companies for bad practices.
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.
Absent broader regulation, we all know that apps like Tea depend HEAVILY on user trust. However, I am a bit concerned users either won't fully grasp the severity of this breach or won't care enough and end up sticking with the app regardless.
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.
Or maybe require them to prominently disclose the breech to all current and future users on the app main screen for some period of time afterward (a year or two?). Sort of like the health-code inspection ratings posted in restaurant windows.
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.
> Appropriate regulation should make this an offense punishable by a large fine.
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.
I would at least love to see a public postmortem. What was the developer's rationale for storing extremely personal user data unencrypted, in a publicly facing database? How many layers of management approved storing extremely personal user data unencrypted, in a publicly facing database? What amount of testing was done that failed to figure out that extremely personal user data was stored unencrypted, in a publicly facing database?
>What was the developer's rationale for storing extremely personal user data unencrypted, in a publicly facing database?
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.
Wow, so the entire company is a Founder and a Social Media Director??
> 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.
Requiring a 3rd-party auditor perform a postmortem whose results are posted publicly might be an interesting regulatory approach to this. Companies get shamed for their mistakes, and also the rest of the industry learns more about which practices are safe and which are dangerous. A bit like NTSB investigation reports, for example.
In the US, professional certifications (PE, Bar, USMLE, CPA) exist to partially solve this problem when the certification is required to perform work legally. These are typically required in industries where lives and livelihoods of individuals and the public are at risk based on the decisions of the professional.
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.
They shouldn't, but it appears to be a gossip app where by design they're also storing photos taken of other people (permission or not) and gossip about them...
According to another media report, the approval queue for new account verification was seventeen hours long. It's possible what the 4channers got was that approval queue.
The cynical part of me feels like certain employees had uncontrolled access to the user data.
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.
I think we can treat it as currency. All nine letters of my SSN, for example, I’ll allow you to store those if in return I get to store the name of the CEO’s boat.
People keep bitching about EU's GDPR but most of it is about sensible things like not storing sensitive data forever just because you can.
Nothing happens to these companies if there are no laws to keep them accountable, most companies I've worked with store everything forever because it's cheap and you never know what might become useful or what you might be able to sell to third parties later
>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.
Car dealership associations have pretty impressive lobbying capabilities. In many (most?) states you must buy a new vehicle from a dealer - it's against the law to buy direct from the manufacturer.
> 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.
Good analogy. Also, this is the main point of the EU GDPR.
> That app made a lot of basement dwelling chuds furious, to the point that someone was willing to risk prison time for a shot at harming those women.
Although undeniably, the data being mostly women does bring in the chuds so it's not entirely wrong, I think this is a shallow take for a couple of reasons:
1. If any app stored user data this freely, it would be stolen and gloated over on 4chan.
2. This app, which I'm learning about just now, seems deeply problematic. It's a place for people to publically share and shame other people that they don't like. The genders of the people doing this doesn't matter, this is called doxxing and it's not ok, no matter how it gets dressed up (women's safety, children's safety, anti-terrorism, anti-drugs, whatever)
Are you being serious right now? No one forced those people to upload their data to this sketchy site. Everyone with one brain cell would know the repercussions of uploading IDs to a no-name site
i think you are assuming a level of computer literacy that doesn't exist in the general population. most people seem to not actually know where data goes when they put it in their phone, how that data is used, or what actually happens on computers in general. They mostly appear as magic to them.
"Do not share personal information online" is a warning that has been heeded since the internet was created. You don't need tech savvy to understand that message, just as you don't need to know anything about zoos to understand "Do not enter the lion cage".
With tech savvy it is possible to understand the dangers well enough to dismiss the common advice in certain cases, but if you don't have it — you had better listen to what others are telling you. If you wish to dismiss it, you are on your own.
The problem is as follows: There is a subset of the population that tends to trust things you say, and this subset is fairly large.
The solution is that we need to make it so that the majority no longer trusts anything people say.
There will be no negative knock-on effects for this, I'm sure.
--
To be less glib, I don't really see a good outcome of this in the long term. If everyone developed the right level of op-sec given the amount of bad actors on the internet, we'd effectively never communicate with another person again.
I am being downvoted for being real. How is the general populous not aware of it? That's wild. Again, you have to be aware of this. It's like privacy 101
The general population hasn't taken privacy 101. They get asked to email their id to their doctor.
If turns out the doctor also hasn't taken privacy 101.
Naw. That’s victim blaming. People have a right to believe that if an online service or app requires identify verification that the data will be protected. If you provide your credit card to uber you assume they put a password on the database and do the things required to protect it.
The idiot no-technical founder failed to do even the most simple and obvious data protection.
Vibecoding is not an excuse. Ask how to secure the data and the AI will answer.
Of course it is right. Victims need to be blamed, else they'll just stupidly do it again. That’s what “blame” is for. But, sure, if 'Tea' snuck up behind these people then there would be some room for sympathy.
But this case is more like you sticking your fingers into an electrical socket, after being warned continuously not to do that, and then crying that it was the utility company's fault for putting something dangerous in your face.
We've been told since the advent of the internet to not share personal information online. If you want to take the risk, you have to accept the consequences. However, in this case the story is even worse as the intent of these people was to violate that rule not just for themselves but for other people as well.
If I lend you my car, and you park in Berkeley leaving your laptop open on the passenger seat... Yes it's your fault my window got smashed and I'd like you to pay for it. Is it your fault your laptop got stolen? Maybe, that's just semantics. But my window being broken is your fault because we all know thieves exist and look for items on seats.
So if you upload your id to a flash in the pan website, who's fault is it when the rookie website turns out to have expectedly low security?
> 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.
That's PR speak for saying that it's a Kiwi Farms clone. I'm sure the two userbases even share their sense of righteousness regarding their own actions.
This case couldn't be more clear cut. It's horrid, and the people running the sites should be held accountable. Two wrongs don't make a right, especially when it will inevitably cost innocent lives, sooner or later.
you forgot the most common use cases in practice: a man you work with slighted you in some small way. now hes going to have sexual assault red flags. the HR lady who already hates men will look you up on tea and decline to hire you because you dont have green flags.
Gossip about the opposite sex is probably the world's oldest social activity. The problem is that the internet lets it happen at industrial scale, and obviously that can be misused or have dangerous unintended consequences.
It's the digital version of a whisper network. Whisper networks have been around as long as humans. Informal ways for people (often women) to share warnings will always self assemble when formal systems don’t protect them.
That said, you;re right to raise concerns about consent and the ethics of sharing information about people without their knowledge. These systems inherently involve trade-offs. When the risk is violence or death, the cost of a false negative (saying nothing) is obvious. So people naturally lean toward maximizing sensitivity, even if that means lower specificity. That;s not ideal, but it's understandable in a world where formal accountability is inconsistent at best, and finding out after the fact isn't an option.
Their existence reflects a failure elsewhere. If we want to reduce the need for them, the solution isn't to shut them down but to make them obsolete. The solution is building systems and cultural norms where violence and coercion are reliably called out and acted upon.
If that idea feels scary or unfair, that's the emotional context many women are already living in. Understanding that is the first step toward addressing why these networks exist in the first place.
Maybe this is a good time to think about what policy could help discourage these horrific practices (it sounds like their storage was unprotected)
* 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.
There has to be a better way than just adding another deterrent to starting a company. Could there be an industry standard for storage security? Certification (a known hurdle) is better than "don't fuck up or we'll fine you to death".
Regulate software development. Other industries already do this.
You could:
- make Software Engineer a protected title that requires formal engineering education and mentorship as well as membership to your country's professional engineering body (Canada already does this)
- make collecting and storing PII illegal unless done by a certified Software Engineer
- add legal responsibility to certified Software Engineers. If a beach like this happens they lose their license or go to jail. And you easily know who is responsible for it because it's the PEng's name on the project
- magically, nobody wants to collect PII insecurely anymore or hire vibe coders or give idiots access to push insecure stuff
- bonus: being a certified Software Engineer now boosts your salary by 5x and the only people that will do it actually know WTF they are doing instead of cowboys, and that company will never hire a cowboy because of liability. The entire Internet is now more secure, more profitable for professionals, and dumb AI junk goes in the trash
I think fines are very reasonable. If you can’t safely do the thing, you should be punished for doing it. If you can’t safely safely do the thing then there is no issue.
Certification is essentially "don't fuck up or we'll fine you to death" with extra steps. Especially because it mostly comes down to the company self-verifying (auditors mostly just verify you are following whatever you say you are following, not that its a good idea).
Its not like anyone intentionally posts their entire DB to the internet.
This is the only way to deter this. Negligence and incompetence needs to cost companies big money, business-ruining amounts of money, or this is just going to keep happening.
the problem is what are the damages? how much are those damages?
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.
Having the threat of lawsuits is not really about the actual lawsuit, its about scaring people into being more careful. If you actually get to the lawsuit stage, the strategy has failed.
> 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.]
The signatures would appear in the drop . A primitive version would be file meta data or jfif. Even the images themselves or steganography could be used
I guess, but it seems a bit like a solution that only works for this specific dump - most db breaches don't have photos in them.
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.
There is no indication that this particular breach was ever on the "dark web" before widely being discovered.
Yes dark web scanners are a thing, but just because something exists does not mean it would work for a specific situation. I'm doubtful they would work most of the time.
That's a reactive measure. Certainly, it's worth pursuing. Though like the notion that you can't protect people from being murdered if you only focus on arresting murderers, there is a need for a preventative solution as well.
just use your brain and don't upload your face and driver's license to a gossip website. when I was growing up, it was common knowledge that you shouldn't post your identity online outside of a professional setting.
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.
While true, using that logic I can say porn is also discussed at work if you work in the porn industry :)
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).
This is becoming more unfeasible as it becomes required to access online services like reddit, nexusmods, verification on dating apps. Sending facial, and documentation data is becoming mandated by governments across the world.
Good thing our children will learn all about this at their mandatory Internet Literacy Fundamentals course they have to take in high school.
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.
In this case it appears to be a public Firebase bucket; shutting down the app wouldn't help. Quite possibly access to Firebase was mediated through a backend service and Apple couldn't validate the security of the unknown bucket anyway.
Also about validating the backends, apple has the resources to provide a level of auditing over the common backends. S3, Firebase -- perhaps the top 5. It's easy to provide apple with limited access to query backend metadata and confirm common misconfigurations.
wouldn't it be funny if the app store had to review it and make sure the personal info was sensitive and possibly humiliating enough . "sir your app has been denied because MY_PERSONAL_INFO table requires at least 3 d-pics"
* Mandate 3rd party auditing once an app reaches > 10k users
* 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
> * Mandate 3rd party auditing once an app exceeds 10k users
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.
also i remember maybe Facebook trying to do this when they acquired Parse. For a while they were promoting developers host their backends on Parse / FB .
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.
thanks. Yeah I think there are a lot of ways to decouple App store from publisher and auditor . That way the publisher can retain autonomy / control , while still developing trust with the consumer.
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.
better, in that the app store has more weight and more leverage to establish more comprehensive auditing.
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.
Linux is up to 5% of the desktop. Gog and Itch.io are DRM-free, and are slowly gaining ground against Steam. Fediverse networks are slowly gaining ground against traditional social media. Signal is more popular then ever.
There will always be lowest-common-denominator users, but there is clearly some demand for an alternative to the biggest 5 websites...
>There will always be lowest-common-denominator users,
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.
I wasn't intending to insult anyone, just to refer to most users as "people who don't want to think about the tools they use, and don't care about privacy". Which i think is true of most people. I never called anyone a moron, they just have different priorities.
Meanwhile, an Android app for some random banking or government thing will require an attested boot chain measured all the way down to the stage 0 ROM burned into the SOC. That's not to say the open ecosystem isn't better, but to say it's winning enough to guarantee sustained general purpose viability is simply untrue.
>* 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.
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.
That still doesn't make sense. How does the ACL work? What prevents the usual shenanigans like cloaking to prevent legitimate detection from working? Moreover what secrets are you even trying to detect? The app API token?
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.
Yeah, the term "breached" was a very poor choice, because it sounds like "this was breached recently" instead of telling "the database could be seen by anyone ever since the app's conception, and it only came to light today" which has much worse implications.
This app's data store was "breached" in the same way that one breaches a castle by walking across the lowered drawbridge, through the open gate, past the empty guard stations.
I wouldn't go that far. What they uncover with their FOIA requests that the general public would otherwise never know about tends to be quality content. And, like the Wired, their FOIA-based articles aren't paywalled.
I hope it served as a good lesson to the average person to be more cautious while submitting sensitive information like a government ID. Just because it's an app with a nice UI doesn't mean it's secure, let alone trustworthy regarding who owns it. Last week I was contacting a government agency here in Canada and the support team requested a government ID to be shared over email, which is anything but a secure communication. I tried to share it as a link to my vault, but they refused, so now either I will have to go in person or they will find another way in the meantime.
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!
CEOs and board members should be personally criminally liable for shared personal information coming out of their platforms.
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
To be fair to the FinTech companies and their leadership, banking and finance laws are so draconian to the point where you'd rather store (and risk leaking) sensitive data than face even bigger fines from the government overlords. If you want that to stop, get rid of the PATRIOT Act and reform the KYC insanity.
> I hope it served as a good lesson to the average person to be more cautious while submitting sensitive information like a government ID.
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.
The sad part is that your government ID is about as likely to be leaked by the government agency itself than it is by any third party that has an scan of it.
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.
You need to do this for background checks for employment, even though the employees for the background check service might be outsourced to a different country, and your government data had no protections in their jurisdiction.
I absolutely realize that this is a function of privilege but I've declined to participate in these sorts of background checks and have still been hired on a few occasions.
I always do. I would have never made social media accounts if it required phone or ID. Thankfully I'm old so my accounts were made before normies flooded the net and started trusting everything.
> Thankfully I'm old so my accounts were made before normies flooded the net and started trusting everything.
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.
> 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!
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.
It was definitely a mistake. The internet was not meant to be taken seriously. Measures like real name policies are designed to make people take it seriously but that is to the detriment of the users who do.
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.
On the rare occasion when I have to do this, I blur the maximum amount of the image and watermark it with hundreds of lines of small red font saying “FOR EMPLOYMENT VERIFICATION BY $X_ENTITY.”
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.
>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).
If my license gets leaked and then a stalker shows up at my house, I will simply turn them away on the grounds that it was illogical to assume the license wasnt faked.
Is there a way, to verify if potential partner uses this app? Or if they are in "are we dating the same guy" type of group?
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.
Would you want your own app usage available to other people? I’m going to guess not. This is a gross request, not surprised you’re using a throwaway account, as you seem to know this is a shameful thing to ask for.
And whatever happens on that app is not gross? If a revenge porn or csam site is busted, won't people want to know who were on it so that they can stay away from the potential predators? Isn't that why sex offenders' lists exist? Honestly, this app should be treated no less. The fact that they were able to remain on App and Play stores in the name of 'women's safety' demonstrate how grossly sexist, populist and vindictive the corporate structure in Apple, Google and the others have become. Binding one side to strict dogma and unwavering standards, while allowing the other side to anonymously wreak havoc on reputations is precisely the type of moral bankruptcy that's being challenged and assailed here.
You need to verify you're a woman with some form of ID before you can get into the app. Faking an ID and a picture can't be that difficult in the age of AI (especially not when the company that's supposed to verify you is this callous with their users' PII), but it's not as quick and easy as you suggest.
If you could imagine what girls and women go through, some on a daily basis, for years, since childhood, I think you might have a better understanding of why a "gossip app" might actually be a pretty sensible option for avoiding sexual assault and worse.
> And why are cis-lesbian-women also reporting higher numbers of sexual assault than man/woman relationship? No men in that relationship.
I think you've misread that paper. The sexual assault survey wasn't limited to sexual assaults within a relationship or limited to one's sexual orientation.
Outsourcing job was it? Modern programmers are literally terrible at all basic stuff (who stores ID images in the db and then in the clear, do you have many other mental issues or what?) (I see startups like Resend making the same mistakes and still people use them, so there isn't much punishment even from people with half a brain) and AI is going to make it all so much worse. And a public bucket. I think it should be criminally liable to be that sloppy.
I don't think it's a modern programmers problem, in fact, I think we can argue we are much better than 20 years ago at least in terms of security.
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.
But that was because no one told them. Now they are told and taught. A lot of systems Warn even for opening something publicly... And yet.
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).
> But that was because no one told them. Now they are told and taught.
That's precisely my point.
> Most (by far) CVE's are not 'honest mistakes' or missed corner cases because rocket-science; they are just sloppy programming.
This is actually true, but it's true because we have way better tooling and safer languages, which means we don't see nearly as many buffer overflows or memory management issues.
It's not that you didn't have negligent programmers back then.
> 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).
That's not new though. We've seen similar things happen in the past multiple times.
20 years ago code review was literally a bunch of meetings in a room or talk with another developer in person. Having something like github where you make a pull request, passes the automated test suite and requires a code review, etc. simply wasn't done. If in 2005 that already existed it was extremely bleeding edge.
I do have concerns about the code quality issues introduced by the abuse of LLMs, but until right before that was a thing, definitely the code quality in general has improved a lot.
I'm a firm believer that if you want to start a tech company, at least one of the founders has to have a technical background. Even if you outsource all the work, you need to be able to ask the right questions related to security.
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.
But now we have amazing vibe coding tools that mean that you don’t need to be technical or whatever - you can just deliver results. After all, the best LinkedIn influencers and founders don’t care about how something is delivered, just what.
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.
Tech background isn’t sufficient. They need to have security background. Some of the worst people I’ve met with respect to security have been technical enough to have the wrong level of confidence.
Doctors need to study 5 to 8 years and pass rigorous exams
Attorneys the same
Structural architects and engineers the same
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
Sad that a common response to "we might not want this app to exist" is "well, if you weren't cheating, you wouldn't have a problem with it".
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.
I think for many people see <cause> and any criticism of something that claims to be relate to that cause is seen as criticism of the cause and that's a full stop when it comes to thinking much further.
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...
I agree that you could make a Tea app for every faction's favorite cause, and use "safety" as the justification: report your local communist, report your local infidel, report your local secret white supremacist, report your local secret Western imperialism agent, report your local suspected jihadi, report a homosexual, report a suspected illegal immigrant, report a local adulterer, report an apostate, report a kulak.. etc. chefkiss
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.
It's so sad that legally you can't even say this was an intrusion. All data was already public. Probably vibe coded by the ceo who has no technical competence in whatever he vibe coded.
The leak contains drivers' licenses, but also location information. Someone on 4chan made a map of all the coordinates they could find and posted a public link.
I feel like that is part of the problem with it. Not only can somebody post about you make things up about you. You also may never know. And it could end up silently impacting you. Say you apply for a job and a female HR person checking your job application decides to use this app to do a "background check" on some of the males applying. If she sees someone on their saying you sexually assaulted someone, she probably isn't going to choose to interview or hire you. And she probably won't even tell you why. And the claim against you could be totally bogus.
This is the scary reality of an app like this, especially if it continued to go more mainstream.
Blaming women for wanting to seek out safety in this way is strange.
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.
And you perhaps watch too much Netflix. Most friend groups do not include a psychopath. And if you date solely based on the recommendations of those friend groups, you can avoid 99% of bad things.
I have, however, scoured decades of court documents and police records (the joys of freelance IT work) and stand by the observation that the absolute worst people can be found everywhere .. including unseen within the most milquetoast seeming circles until that day when acquaintances voxpop "they seemed like such a nice person" statements.
That's drawn from real life, not Netflix.
Sex pests can easily be professors, judges, police, priests, child physiologists, good Christians, devout Muslims, upstanding Jews, you name it.
How fast would an app for men, to identify false accusers, liars, afterwards regret, baby-trapping attempt, sabotaging contraceptives, and other false claims, get shut down for 'evilness towards poor innocent women'?
Just as Parieto indicates that the bulk of male sexual assaults are done by a few, also indicates that the bulk of female assaults and claims of sexual assault are also done by a few.
Apps like Tea only paint all men as abusive thugs. If this were done, say to black people, this app would have been shut down and a lawsuit in federal court filed. But men are OK to harass, libel, and demean.
Good on anonymous for exposing this obvious double standard. And I hope they get sued by everyone.
Because our entire civilization is built on recipricoal alturism, which requires reputation so that in the event someone defects it carries negative consequences to discourage defection.
We're in agreement. Is an anonymous takedown app the solution for reputation management that enables civilization? If someone is trying to destroy your reputation, on which your entire livelihood depends, should you at least know who the accuser is, how reputable they are, what evidence they have? Do you want to give the Internet a magical button to destroy you on a whim?
I actually agree with you that this sort of thing can have bad outcomes and thus comes with significant risk for abuse. Part of the reason reputational systems work in real life is that the people bad mouthing other people also face reputational consequences if they do so unfairly (over a long enough time period where it becomes obvious), which is something missing from this type of app.
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 mostly agree, but it's different for women due to how frequently they are subject to violence and how comparatively defenseless they are compared to the average man. Many women (and men) would gladly give up some privacy in exchange for (perceived) safety. And any man who doesn't understand that is either lying or has never known a woman.
It's fair that men and women have different challenges here. But humans are squishy and chaotic and self-interested, they're not angels of pure wisdom, fairness and justice. Giving someone a repercussion-free button to destroy someone else the instant they feel slighted, vindictive, threatened, jealous, disrespected, is a recipe for disaster. There's a reason these apps have not once worked sustainably, they always turn into a vile cesspool that brings the worst out of mobs.
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.
for someone who thought Tea was a good idea, what would be the objection be if this leaked contributor data were used to populate a similar app to warn men off?
There's no objection, but it doesn't work because men compete while women collude.
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.
obviously it would be malicious and unethical, but since that didn't seem to stop Tea users, I'd be interested in what their arguments against it would be.
One could say that about any company (because "fiduciary duty", amirite?).
"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?
But when a company makes moral arguments ("We're better than others because of X") the bar goes up.
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.
Apple fired its Chief Diversity Officer when she said that white men with blue eyes can also count towards a diverse workforce. A purely non-monetary ideological capitulation.
I think it was a perfectly reasonable statement. But because it does not align with a recent radical redefinition of diversity, she was fired. Apple certainly wasn’t at risk of losing money over keeping her in that role.
A flash in the pan gossip app that when it functions normally is not worried about anyone's privacy / accuracy ... also doesn't care about good policies or their user's privacy.
Painting this as a "gossip" app seems extraordinarily reductive. Women have a good incentive to share info about and to one another for safety beyond "gossip."
If guys had an app that women couldn't access where we shit talked all of our exes with photo evidence women would riot at the company HQ.
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.
Is it reductive? It also has good incentive for someone jilted or misinterpreting something to suddenly tarnish someone's reputation with little recourse for the other party. It is a one-sided review app for people in a way that people affected may never even know!
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.
In 2008 when the GFC every company we worked IT for on contract fired their IT staff first. Two weeks later, we had bonanza period right through into the next year. They realised the hard way that those lowly cheap IT staff were quietly keeping them afloat. We charged a lot to fix their problems they created because their CEO thought IT was a waste of money.
This will prove security in IT coding is necessary, so enjoy watching the drama unfold.
it should have never been allowed to be published anyway. not trying to justify what is happening, but these kind of apps are historically abused and create more problems than they intentionally try to solve.
On X, one of the leaked pictures seemed to be a DoD ID card, and I wondered why Tea needed proof of someone's identity. Then I remembered Uber and Lime both want your drivers license. Facebook and Instagram supposedly request it too if your account gets locked. This is not a new normal I like.
> At 6:44 AM PST on 7/25, we identified unauthorized access to our systems and immediately launched a full investigation to understand the scope and impact of the incident. Here’s what we know at this tim
The first sentence is already a lie as there was never authorization in place followed by more lies.
Not to be overly pedantic but authorization and security are two different things. If I leave my front door unlocked and open, that doesn't mean Bob the Homeless Hobo is authorized to enter my house.
This reminds me of people saying "a honest person has nothing to hide". A honest woman who has nothing to hide, would post stories under her name and write her address, GPS coordinates and phone number in case someone needs clarifications or has objections to the post.
Even if only a few women are abusive and gossiping, they will doxx a lot of innocent men. At that stage, that entire app should be treated as illegal and shut down, instead of hoping that Apple legal will find the time to settle each complaint. The entire app is a toxically bigoted concept that gets a pass because the term 'women's safety' is attached to it.
I'm failing to see how this app is legal. States like Arizona have recently passed anti doxxing laws. Posting any information on this app with the intent of social pressure, harassment, etc is illegal in those states.
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.
I recently saw a screenshot from one of these apps (so I can't guarantee its authenticity. But it's not an inconceivable scenario). Someone posted a man in there with his photo. The elephant in the room is that the man is dead! His ex-wife (with whom he had children) is enraged by this and is demanding to have it removed. Instead of addressing her concern, one of them decides to report her!
Now this may be an anecdotal argument. But when it pertains individual rights and human dignity, even a single violation is sufficient to question the ethics and legality of such endeavors. An important fact here is that nobody has absolute rights. Any rights are valid only as long as they don't infringe on someone else's rights. So, smearing, maligning and vilifying someone cannot be justified in the name of 'women's safety'.
This is one of those cases where you can't find a balance between both sides. One side is objectively wrong. Ruining the lives of any number of innocent men must not be an acceptable compromise for ensuring women's safety. There must be ways to achieve that without causing such widespread collateral damage. Their argument to the contrary is not just lazy, it reeks of hubris and contempt.
I don't usually care about downvotes, but it's alarming when those votes are in support of a bigoted stance like in this instance. I don't support doxxing, defamation or bullying of any innocent person, including women. But why is this utterly detestable act being justified and upheld when the victims are men? Would the response be the same if the genders in that message were swapped? This is just a single example of how unabashedly sexist the HN crowd in general (and the corporate world in general) has become. I hope that the individuals who strike at the opposition to such toxic behavior are very proud of their irrationally lopsided sense of justice and their contributions to a very fractured and bitter society.
It's almost poetic that this happens on the same day UK demands website to collect personal identification. I'm looking forward to the shitshow in the upcoming months.
Gentlemen, we're working on a new app called Eyeroll. It's a revolutionary new dating app, where our users can rate the women they have dated based on favorable and/or unfavorable attributes. Every month, our marketing team will generate a scoreboard of profiles that score highest on all mainstream attributes, and our search and filter function will rival that of Amazon (including the much requested sort by lowest first.) We're seeking $23-to-$23.5 million in funding to get our product over the finish line.
- 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 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.
> 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.
Yeah, I wouldn't worry about the allegedly part, 4chan is dissecting that torrent as we speak, it's quite the party.
>> Let's be real you wrote men/women only to be PC. You really meant small group of men.
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.
People with stable values and relationships most likely won't be on these apps. The wide acceptance of hookup culture via apps is not universal.
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.
>In some cultures, mentioning dating apps will immediately lead to negative assumptions
Hell, that's the case in my culture, and I'm a modern American. These dating apps seem to be a consequence of modern urban disfunction, and I can't imagine ever using one. Or admitting without shame that I did.
Now, that's my feeling, but I realize that others have different feelings, depending on which subcultures you're immersed in.
Not sure about what "some cultures" you're talking about, but AFAIK "dating apps" is the #1 answer (or at least in the top 3) to "how did you meet your partner" in many countries. They're not just for hookups. Many even market themselves as being for committed relationships, or have features to facilitate that (eg. filters).
Why the downvote? It is just pictures and names. Both disclosed against their will but, and this is the ROTFL part, this is exactly what the ladies did. Uploading pictures and names of unsuspecting male victims and violating their privacy.
I’d like to start seeing legal jeopardy for companies that are careless with customer information. Make developers scared to retain anything they don’t absolutely need.
if im understanding correctly this was a public bucket? aside from the obvious leaking of data couldnt this also be subject to a DoW (denial of wallet) attack where a user could auto download all the images constantly on a VPS and cause a massive bill?
according to the company this was an old bucket they used prior to 2024 when they moved to a more robust system.
So...they were storing people's information long term in a publically accessible bucket when users did not know. In fact, I believe users were told their IDs/selfies were immediately deleted(not stored), then Tea turned around and says they were legally required to store those photos. Tea had to address this in their press release, apparently.
"An app was created to help women stay safe on dates and avoid creeps, proceeds to be hacked by creeps"
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...
An app that was created to publicly share images and public information of people got the images and public information of the people sharing it exposed.
I don't know how can anyone feel wrong about this without feeling even worse for what was already taking place.
What's the actual violation though? If you click through the "User Generated Content" link, it shows that it's allowed, just that they have to moderate it.
But how would you know your photo or any slander is even on there? From what I heard, the app requires a photo and video based verification through a third party service to determine if you’re a woman (which itself seems problematic). Without that access you wouldn’t even know if your information is on there.
IMO, you don't need individual grievances to shut down that app. A lot of the content has already been leaked - some even by women who don't necessarily agree with the method. And there are a lot of complaints based on them. Many don't even need you to know the background of the men to know that they are toxic and unethical (and probably illegal as well). Cases like 'ghosting after a single date', 'not good in bed', something else equally frivolous or a lot of one-sided narratives. What do all these have to do with 'women's safety', as much as they have to do with men's safety? A lot of men are genuinely weary of dating precisely because of those (I'm talking about men who prefer relationships, not the MGTOW types). This is extremely harmful to the society in general. I believe that these platforms are misusing the 'women's safety' argument to exploit corporate bias in order to circumvent anti-doxxing safeguards and reinforce a very toxic culture.
I get this feeling that you will be downvoted to oblivion on HN if you talk against anything that harms men. Even when it involves technology and is therefore relevant here. Many seem to think that gender equality, justice, sexual violence, etc applies only to one gender. I really would like to know how we reached this situation and their justifications for it.
I think there is a stupid propensity to overcorrect in the mainstream media about polarizing issues for profit which has been normalized by repeated messaging and has spread into our normal lives like a disease.
Violence again women is very real and men have been the main inflictors of it. However violence against men isn't physical because just biology. So it takes more insidious forms which combined with expectations of masculinity makes it so much more worse.
If we chose to selectively condemn the former kind of visible violence without protesting the more hidden kind, it is equally toxic as condoning violence against women.
Proudly lauding an app that enables scaling up of this kind of toxicity without any recourse by giving women carte blanche is another form of extremism.
The trend has been for all things related to sex, dating and relationships to be aggressively male hostile. But I think it's certainly peaked. Off topic, any notice how anti -male bumble is? Trash app.
If you look at the API, it is a slop app. The IDs were being uploaded to a public Firebase bucket. Chats are also public now. The full API keys are leaked because they were in the shipped app.
I would not be disappointed if some actual hacking was done to bring down the entire app. I don't think the Tea app realizes just how many competent people dislike them, and they clearly have very few competent people of their own.
For those who wish for the old days - "Vibe Coding" - shonky websites with shonky security, doxxing on all sides, 4chan pops back into relevance. You get your early internet redo.
The UK and some US states are instituting age verification for adult content. Doxxing thousands of women is a great way to get people talking about privacy and security.
That feels like a hell of a risk to take just to get a conversation started. Not just the obvious implications of endangering all the users, but the cloud that's going to hang over everyone associated with Tea, now.
Not to get all conspiratorial, but if I was an incel, or other type of woman-hating-man, with an axe to grind, creating an app to "protect" women and their dirty secrets, then having their data "breached" would be a pretty diabolical revenge plan. Only women can join the app, but the only person running the app is a man? Nothing suspicious about that...
This is such excruciating incompetence by the app developers I'm wondering if it was intentional. Done to punish the women who dared to speak up about vile men.
I just hope they can pursue legal action for this, whether it was a deliberate trap or not.
Great suggestion, very practical and well intentioned. On that note, I had another idea; toxic women should stop associating with men. They should take themselves off the dating apps and stop ruining the lives of any men that might be unfortunate enough to pair up with them. My suggestion is just as practical as your suggestion I think. The toxic women can self-identify and voluntarily exclude themselves just as well as the creepy men.
Then they can't complain about how horrible people are. Unfortunately, being a victim is a large part of many people's personalities. This is especially true for the "chronically single" people on dating apps. It's never their fault people don't want to date them! It's everyone else who is horrible.
Years ago when I was on the apps and went on dates it was obvious who these people were. They rarely actually go on dates because every person they match with is a predator to them. Then, if an actual date happened, it would quickly go nowhere because they're treating you as if you're a predator. The whole vibe with these people is awkward and judgmental. Then folks wonder why their dating app experience is bad.
- 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.
> The fact that this app exists solidifies that a small group of men/women do most of the dating on the quick fleeting connections on tinder etc while the vast majority on a few if not none at all.
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.
http://archive.today/U5Tah
Freewalled
Freewalled I like that
Is that site down? I'm just getting the default nginx page.
There is a long-standing conflict between archive and cloudflare
https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked
Strange! Doesn't seem to be down, at least at time of writing (either my original post or this one)
I linked the plain HTTP version... which seems to rely on a series of redirects; potentially TOR:
Tough to say :) Vaguely reminiscent of SNI troubles on the web server... which can depend on the client. I thought that was becoming exceedingly irrelevant, though.I've seen this issue with certain dns providers. I don't have issues with google dns (8.8.8.8).
Isn't this basically Peeple except gender locked to women? Peeple failed because they couldn't eliminate bias and gossip against anyone. If someone was jealous of another, for example, that person could just write false slander and claim it was real with no evidence. That would have affected the victim for jobs, dates, etc. So it was laughed at by VCs and everyone online and it shut down.
How is Tea even legal? Isn't this just a legal libel timebomb waiting to happen?
Defamation (libel and slander) consists of false statements (or direct implications) of fact. Actionable defamation consists either of those false claims that cause quantifiable damages, or that claim things that are per se considered damaging --- a specific and limited list.
"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.
> or that claim things that are per se considered damaging --- a specific and limited list
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.
It does, but those bars to defamation claims are based on the US Constitution more than they are on state law. I think another way to put that is that I gave the maximally generous interpretation to the plaintiff there.
> "This guy is a creeper and treats romantic partners terribly" is pure opinion, and cannot be defamatory.
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.
Just keep in mind there are two very high bars you need to clear to come out ahead on a defamation action:
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.
Worth pointing out that you're talking purely from a US point of view, and different countries treat slander and libel differently.
For example in the US, to sue for defamation you need to prove something is false, whereas in the UK the defendant has to prove that what they said or wrote (and are being sued for) is true.
(I've no idea whether this app had any non-US use, but thought worth adding this comment regardless since it's a general point about defamation law and being discussed on a site with a big international audience.)
I wonder if you would make the same comment if the genders were reversed.
"Cofee App" for males only, that allows them to post pictures of woman they have dated, rate them and include green/red flags.
"She is not good enough in bed", "She is too fat", "She has a high body count",..
Arguing over the legal definition of the word "Defamation" is missing the forest for the trees.
> "She is too fat"
Do modern men need an app to understand this?
A general plug that if you read this comment and thought “damn, 1st amendment law sounds complex and interesting”, you may want to check out https://www.serioustrouble.show/ , a podcast about legal news with a recurring focus on 1st amendment law and cases
But you can ruin a person’s life on a whim. That cannot be allowed.
Can you cite that? Because in the US I’m not aware of a law against sharing negative opinions about someone.
Right - that's basically the business model of Twitter these days
This also seems like an app ripe for actual creep / abusers to follow / manipulate.
The claim that it provides safety really is just that, an empty claim.
The fact that it verifies by ID scan is also not safe at all for a million different reasons.
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
I think you underestimate the willingness of people to pay to troll, it may filter out people but an app that was (in theory) meant to be secure shouldn't think of a problem as filtering rather than securing. Admins knowing peoples' identities simply moves the weakest link in the chain to the admins. I think an app like this was doomed from the start and 4chan simply pulled the plug on an already leaking bathtub.
I've thought about buying throwaway phone numbers just to troll linkedin. I'd be surprised if people weren't finding ways to get accounts on apps like this for trolling.
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.
Are there any premium troll Sites?
Twitter with check mark
Great point.
>A better way would have been to charge a small subscription fee - like $2/month or something.
That's Pure. And they have more than 5$ I believe.
> 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
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.
> 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.
So the same as it was before you could buy them?
Whats wrong with verifying the ID?
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
> who wants to pay to troll
You've never visited X (formerly known as Twitter)?
you act like it's impossible to get payment credentials that have nothing to do with the user
no, but it is _tremendously_ more difficult than email or even ID scans (unless you're doing actual verification, which is both more expensive and complicated than just charging a nominal fee or even just attaching a Card object to a stripe customer). Just getting to stand on top of an extremely robust existing system (payments) gets you so much adjacent help in keeping bad actors out, or at least getting it down to a human-team manageable level. It can be the difference between a viable business and not.
› extremely robust existing system (payments)
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.
Payment systems are significantly more robust than taking a picture of an ID to prove you’re you.
> you act like it's impossible to get payment credentials that have nothing to do with the user
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.
> 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
Many people will do anything they can to hurt their ex after a breakup.
Hey now! They use ID verification bub - how are you gonna fake that? It’s not like there are just public buckets of legitimate ID photos taken by real women for you to hoover up. Check mate.
>> How is Tea even legal? Isn't this just a legal libel timebomb waiting to happen?
By this logic: I suppose glassdoor, yelp, or Google reviews aren't legal either?
What about identity verification as part of any employment offer?
The difference is, on these platforms you're rating legal entities. On Tea, you're rating, or rather sharing personal information about, an individual. Where I come from, sharing personal data of someone without their consent is not allowed.
Also on those platforms you can see if people are trash talking you even if you don’t have a procedure to face your accuser.
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.
> Where I come from, sharing personal data of someone without their consent is not allowed.
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.
They post images of the men in question without consent.
Unless they are intimate images (in which case revenge porn laws are likely to apply), copyrightable images for which someone other than the poster is the creator posted without the copyright holder’s permission (in which case copyright applies), or being used for commercial promotion or to suggest endorsement (in which case, depending on which states law applies, state law right of personality/publicity, especially if the subject is a celebrity, might apply), that's generally legal in the US.
> that's generally legal in the US.
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.
> It runs afoul of about a dozen european rights to privacy, imagery and consent laws
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.
It's cute that the Americans think they're some special, unrestricted by law type of citizens: they're not.
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.
While the GDPR has extraterritoriality, you are over-reaching here.
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.
Facebook can't do it because Facebook has a legal presence in Europe and does business with European advertisers and financial companies. If a business doesn't have, and doesn't want, that presence it can ignore GDPR.
No. Tea can have no legal presence in the EU, but if it collects data from people in the EU at the time of collection, then it is caught be GDPR. It would be offering services to people in the EU in this case, and so has to deal with their laws, including privacy and consumer protections.
Steam tried this stuff on in Australia too, saying it had no presence there, but still sold games to Australians. In particular, they didn't want to honour Australia's consumer rights laws regarding refunds. They fought hard in the courts and lost, and it improved steam for almost everyone.
Big tech try on these jurisdiction arguments all the time, but they've repeatedly failed where you are selling goods to, or providing services to, people in those jurisdictions. The US does the same thing. If you sell or provide services to someone in XX state, you need to abide by the consumer laws (and maybe privacy if it is a state like CA) of that state.
This is one of the reasons paypal and Escrow.com have had a competitive advantage. It is hard getting money transmission / escrow licenses in all 50 states like they do. There are many such examples.
Oh, it may be in violation of the GDPR, but European law doesn't have jurisdiction in the US. It literally doesn't matter unless they don't want to give up their European paid subscriptions.
Valve did not want to give up its Australian income stream, which is why it went to court.
Unrestricted by foreign law, yes. Would you be in favor of having US law enforced against you? It bewilders me why anyone would want more of this nonsense in the world instead of less.
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.
US law is _already_ enforced upon me. Banks regularly ask if you are a US citizen, or subject to the IRS in any way. The US affirms at every step the extraterritoriality of its harmful laws and attempts to use their pathetic excuse of "free speech" to defend multimillion dollar companies evading taxes in my country while damaging democracy. The US imposes its definition of copyright to the world, destroying access to culture and knowledge to billions.
Needless to say, I am very happy about making the US eat shit.
Why would they care if they're breaking European laws? They're not a European company.
European laws apply to any European citizen, _anywhere in the world_.
This is not true. Like, (almost) at all. (There are a few tiny exceptions, for instance, if an EU national commits child sexual abuse overseas, they can be prosecuted for it in the EU)
Two Germans shooting each other in Australia break Australian law, but not German law.
Germany does in fact prosecute severe crimes done in foreign countries. It will not act if Australia does, but it will act if Australia doesn't.
Ah yes, the notorious extraterritorial "right to be forgotten". Whereby the EU military dispatches its special forces to smash up computers in foreign data centers.
No, that isn't true. To the contrary actually, the GDPR applies to anyone on European soil, even US citizens. When you're on American soil, you fall under American legislation.
Are you saying the developers are European or what?
Honey, that's generally not legal in many jurisdictions in the world, including most of europe.
True, but we're not talking about those jurisdictions. This is a discussion about American users of an American app.
Thank god the US is the only country in the world.
> Thank god the US is the only country in the world.
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?
Why have revenge porn laws and not revenge libel laws.
What are "revenge libel laws", and, in particular, how would they differ from regular libel laws?
Harsher penalties for a specific circumstance.
That's not really analogous to revenge porn laws (where the “revenege" part is both non-literal—the actual condition is lack of consent—and refers to a special circumstance that makes what is normally legal, illegal, not an enhanced penalty for existing offense.)
But if your proposed concept of “revenge libel” laws are just, as you say an added penalty for a subset of existing libel offenses, then while they might add more severe sanctions, they don't change the scope of what is prohibited, so they wouldn't change the calculus on whether anything is illegal.
Nah, man. They wanted to go on a date. There is risk involved, and implied consent.
This isn't any different from a friend sharing details of their date with somebody they know (including pictures). If it's a bad date, I'm sure the tone of the conversation would be different (and might include "stay away from this person")
> Where I come from
…is clearly not the US, which has probably the most expansive understanding of “freedom of speech” in the world.
So totally free, unless you criticise the empero… err, Trump or the government, of course. Or if you're against Israeli settlements. Or in favour of humane treatment of the People of Palestine. Or have information on the customers of Jeffrey Epstein. Or…
You can say all those things. Will some people think you're an idiot and refuse to do business with you? Sure. But you're not going to be arrested for things you say in the US unless you're making threats.
Tell that to the detained foreign students which participated in Israel protests.
They're not criminal defendants, though. These are people who have violated their visas and are losing their right to be in the US.
They violated their visas by virtue of having the wrong opinion. At the time they voiced this opinion, there was no indication this would result in the revocation of their visas, so there's that.
Also, I was under the impression the constitution referred to everyone on American soil equally when it comes to the fundamental civil rights, which includes freedom of speech, the right to due process, and the right to gather; yet, several people have been detained, without due process, for their speech, or for peaceful assembly.
Again, there's a big difference between being charged with a crime and having your visa revoked. If you're in the US on a visa you're a guest of the country and only have the right to be here as long as do (and not do) the things you agreed to when you applied for the visa.
Again, these students first had their visa revoked, and were then detained without a lawyer, and taken away to an unknown location.
The constitution protects free speech, regardless of citizenship. Having their visa revoked for inconvenient speech is problematic in itself, but using that as a ploy to strip people of their fundamental rights is completely unacceptable.
That's how the visa system works. When you lose your visa, you get deported.
The constitution does not protect non-visa-holding people from deportation regardless of the reason the visa was revoked. In this case the visa was revoked because they were supporting a foreign terrorist organization, which is something they promised not to do when applying for a visa. This is not something that needs to be proven in court unless the government is filing criminal charges.
Nobody's rights are being stripped. They're simply being forced to leave the country. They do not have a right to be here.
Let me a bit more precise. I'm not claiming that the US actually always follows its own standards, or that there aren't authoritarian oversteps of power -- there are.
I'm just saying that the American definition of freedom of speech (whether the authorities follow it in practice or not) is unusually expansive. Edge cases like hate speech against particular ethnic groups, public insults, open support for terrorist organizations, etc. are much more likely to be legally protected in the US than in other countries, even including other liberal democracies.
That used to be the case, and I agree in principle. With the current administration, however, this is no longer true. Freedom of speech stops being free speech if the government detains people and revokes visas for having a certain opinion, tries to dictate the curriculum at universities, forces trans people to their birth gender, acts against lawyers with the wrong clients, excludes unwanted media from press conferences or sues them altogether… this list goes on for a while.
Donald Trump is a danger to the fundamental rights granted by the constitution, and the republicans are assisting him in tearing it down.
Okay, but we're getting a little off topic. The point I was responding to was about whether it's legal to share information in a totally apolitical scenario where normal laws presumably still apply.
That it would, but the world isn’t apolitical and freedom of speech is not a strong argument as it used to be.
Well I'm not American but I feel like all I have read for the last 8 months has been American organisations and American people criticising Trump, the US government and Israel. I am not aware of penalties for these orgs or people, do you have examples?
There are countless examples, and they are easily accessible via the news or your preferred search engine. Here is a selection:
lol no it doesn't. american freedom is a bit of a joke but it's par for the course in the USA to make shit up and then defend it.
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.
In my personal and equally arbitrary freedom index north korea is #1.
I neither agree nor disagree with the specific point about the US but all those indexes are silly, pointless and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Also they have very little to do with “measuring” freedom of speech anyway.
> On Tea, you're rating, or rather sharing personal information about, an individual.
Or in this case, sharing personal information about yourself...
No, they'd be sharing the man's photo, name and phone number if I am not mistaken, and obviously without his consent.
I think its a mostly US based app, in the US sharing your opinion about other people is protected speech.
But sharing *facts* about other people is potentially defamatory speech (in the American context). There's a not-at-all small nuance here: when you make concrete allegations about your personal experiences, you're not sharing an opinion—not sharing your subjective reaction to publicly-known information—rather you're introducing novel facts, provable objective facts, into the discussion—your version of those facts. And that comes with genuine legal risks.
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.
I thought, as a practical matter, it's on the person alleging slander or libel to prove falsehood?
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.
Hypothetically, if I said "firefax murdered an underage prostitute and then sexually violated the underage prostitute's corpse in 2018 and was never caught, I witnessed it happen and tried to report it but the police refused to even open an investigation, firefax is a dangerous predator and should not be trusted", and you lost your job because of that, should you be the one with the burden to prove that never happened?
We are talking about what is the law in a specific country, not what “should” be the law. Also, the bizarrely graphic description is out of place here.
It's a visceral thought experiment, intended to instill a sense of bewilderment at what being falsely accused actually feels like to someone who seems to offer a normative assertion that privileges bad-faith accusers, without actually causing any of the harm of a real false accusation. That is topically relevant and experientially informative while being restrained enough to not be actually harmful.
It’s complicated in the US. The rules of thumb as I understand them are:
1) The truth is an absolute defense against libel claims, but it is a defense, so you must prove the truth of your claims.
2) Statements of opinion (or that a “reasonable person” would understand to be opinion) are with few exceptions protected. “Firefax is a rapist” is likely to not be considered a statement of opinion. “Firefax is a creepy asshole” likely is. “Firefax is a sexual predator” is probably going to be in a grey area and context and damages will be relevant.
3) The more “public” of a person you are, the harder it is to win a libel case, even the statements were false. For example, let’s say it turns out both that there is some “Epstein List” describing clients and their activities, and also that it turns out Trump doesn’t appear anywhere in that list. Trump is such a public figure (both as a celebrity and as the POTUS) that he would be extremely unlikely to win any libel cases against the internet randos confidently asserting he’s on the list even though that statement would have been a statement of fact, and would have been false.
4) A key part of the “opinion” grey area is whether you imply knowledge of heretofore unknown facts, or your relying on publicly available data. Internet randos might not lose a case, but someone like Elon Musk might if they said something like “I’ve seen the case files, Trump is definitely on that list and has done some sick things”. This is because Musk could reasonably be believed to have had privileged access to the information in question and have non-public facts they are basing their statements on. Internet randos on the other hand are largely going to be considered making their statements on the back of publicly known facts (e.g. photos, business connections, public actions and statements) and general “vibes”
> But sharing facts about other people is potentially defamatory speech
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.
The most obvious legal claim at the moment is that Tea was negligent about its security.
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.
If it's an opinion or a statement of a fact it isn't defamation.
"He's a bad person and you shouldn't date him" is an opinion you can legally express anywhere as much as you want.
That's all true. I wasn't clear on the context of this thread, whether we were talking about the users or the platform.
Is making a post on eg Instagram after breaking up with your ex and telling that she/he e.g. abused you, illegal too?
Heard of Amber Heard?;)
I mean, I think it depends what you claim in this post.
Your memory of Amber Heard trial is probably largely misrepresented by the media. Reading wiki article about it should be enough.
What exactly is misrepresented?
It’s hardly a rebuttal when I have to go and find all the evidence to prove myself wrong.
Even if it’s true and provable, very few people have the money to defend a defamation matter.
Sharing your opinion is protected speech, by lying is not always protected speech, particularly if done with the intent to financially hurt someone.
Devil's advocate, but how is saying someone is an unreliable romantic partner going to financially hurt someone? Maybe the reason I haven't had success in the policy arena is because I've been too kind, given recent events :-)
What words do you think a vindictive ex uses? I don’t think ‘unreliable romantic partner’ are any of them.
I have seen false rape claims, false claims of child abuse, neglect, etc.
With zero repercussions, of course.
I'm not sure, it depends case to case and what the court thinks. I think, generally, if you can prove it directly caused you to lose lots of money then you can make an argument.
If you're boss is on the app.
Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying and intending to hurt men, because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women?
A few days ago a video leaked of a woman riding in a Mexican taxi, who was demanding the driver went faster. He refused because it'd be dangerous, and she immediately started threatening to report him as a harasser to the police. She even said he had to speed up or else the police would be waiting for him when they got there. She didn't realize her whole conversation was recorded on camera.
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.
"A lot of men" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
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 the time a man has hit his 40’s, it is exceptionally uncommon he hasn’t seen someone hit with a false rape claim - or had one himself - by a vindictive ex. Or has been threatened with (or directly attacked) with physical violence.
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.
The problem is that you're equating the wide range of violence against women with a specific kind of violence against men by calling both "bad things", insinuating those are even remotely comparable. They are not. 90% of rape victims are female. In the US alone, every 68 seconds, a woman is sexually assaulted.
After the big war, some Germans were quick to point out that their people had suffered when they were displaced from the land they occupied in Poland, for example, and that "both sides had suffered". I assume you're also incapable of understanding why the victims of the Nazi regime were completely aghast by that?
> But it sure does (or should!) make anyone with a brain question hyperbolic claims of abuse or violence without actual evidence.
What do you suggest to do instead? Sexual violence is often a crime with only the perpetrator(s) and the victim as witnesses. In most cases, rape doesn't leave persistent traces. Rape victims tend to be in shock, however, and often need time to process what happened. Your suggestion seems to be that we should question these claims?
Judging these cases correctly is incredibly complicated, and claims of wide swaths of men falling prey to abusive women don't really help anyone affected.
There is a reason ‘he said, she said’ is widely known as the shittiest type of situation, eh?
Yes, we should question those claims, and any others. Or everyone who wants to be shitty will do it via that route. It’s basic shitty human behavior.
That it screws actual victims is why people gaming the system should be punished.
But not challenging these claims just makes more victims too. And eventually people will just tune out accusations, because the shittiness has gotten too pervasive. And then the predators/shitty humans will get be doing more actual rape eh? Which is terrible.
This is why it’s also prudent to be very careful who anyone is alone with, favor video recording of public spaces, etc. as well. Because the best way to avoid a situation is to make it as difficult as possible for the situation to occur, and minimize the chances of any ambiguity. Which is also shitty for everyone.
Personally, I also don’t trust the stats because I’ve seen many (5+) women retcon clearly consensual behavior (that they were even bragging about before!) into ‘he raped me’ when someone tried to shame them for it later, or there was some leverage they could get out of it. I had one who literally admitted to me when I investigated that she was doing it to punish the guy for refusing to date her later. Another was fine until she went home and her mom gave her crap about her dating behavior, and then all the sudden it was rape. Until we started to interview her for her story, and then she admitted it was consensual.
I very much believe actual rapes and SA’s occur. I personally have literally never seen an accusation for rape or SA that stood up to even the lightest scrutiny, within the environments I’ve been responsible for. And not because I was trying to avoid them!
The joys of being a manager of mixed sex groups eh?
If we could figure out the actual truth of these situations, then we could punish actual offenders and not constantly be in this BS situation.
I do. Not as an indictment of women but an indictment of social apps. Apps like this are way too hard to moderate, manage and verify. They quickly get swarmed by bad actors and misused. Again, not because women don't have genuine safety concerns in the dating world but because apps are not a viable way to manage those concerns.
Some social problems just don't have technological solutions.
Like online reviews, if 10 women reported that the same man was violent, would you see it as 10 data points or 0 data points that say nothing?
You know the answer to that is zero. There is no viable system a company, let alone a small unfunded startup, could use to verify the identity of the reporters let alone guarantee the trustworthiness of the account.
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.
You’ve never read the story of the Halifax Slasher, have you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Slasher
I'm sorry and I'll be voted down for this, but I do think that it will attract plenty of fibbing and deliberate or not-so-deliberate stretching of the truth. Anyone who is rejected tends to be a bit angry about it. In this case, women who are ghosted can say whatever they want.
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.
> Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying
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.
We grant a tremendous amount of leeway and power to accusations made by women against men in society today. There are always honest people using things for their intended purpose. Though they are also dishonest people using things for their own ulterior motives.
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.
> because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women?
The more common it is, the more damaging false claims of it are. It's a self-defeating linear relationship.
That's not really relavent to whether someone is going to get sued for defamation.
It might be relavent to who wins the lawsuit, but sometimes the mere existence of a lawsuit is pretty painful.
Sure, and what was proposed was suing the women for warning others about an allegedly dangerous man, not suing the man.
>for warning others about an allegedly dangerous man
I mean if witches didn't do anything surely they wouldn't be hunted down.
So all I need to do to mark another guy (who might be, for example, competing for a job I want, or a certain woman's attention) as a rapist on a platform that's used by people in the location this guy lives in in the US is a (fake) female driver's license, a photo of the guy in question, and a name?
coolcoolcool. I'm sure that never ever gets abused horrifically.
That doesn't apply when you publish information for broad consumption. Then it becomes libel. People need to realize that posting on a site where you can reasonably expect that your words may be consumed by the masses makes you a publisher. That comes with responsibilities and is not protected the same way as an individual's personal speech.
Not if it’s libel or slander, both which are generically defamation.
It's not defamation if it's true. Why do you think women warning other women about rapey and stalker men are mostly lies? Even if it's only 5% of men, wouldn't the discussion focus on that dangerous 5% over persecuting the innocent 95%, as a matter of self-preservation?
An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. While it's controversial for men to be concerned about women as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm.
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.
Maybe it's different now, I have no clue, but I'm in my 40's now and don't make a habit of hanging out with 20 year olds.
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.
> An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm.
The same hypothetical 5% can inflict harm to multiple women, that's why multiple women and girls complained about Epstein and Trump.
What was leaked was women's personal data, like driver's licenses. What they shared with each other was their experiences with men who sexually assaulted them or stalked them and their names, not the men's personal data.
Men's driver licenses were not distributed online. Only women's driver licenses were distributed online.
I'm not familiar with this app, but surely those accusations of sexual assault are only useful to other users of the men are sufficiently well identified?
Name and photo.
So… Personal data?
The article says that what gets shared with the app is a picture of the man, and it's not just "those who sexually assaulted them or stalked them" but anyone they want feedback about.
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!
> This may be legal in the US, but not under GDPR.
This whole story is an amazing example of why the GDPR is correct about this, IMHO.
There are soo many examples from the US showing why GDPR is a good thing: Clearview AI (biometric mass surveillance, essentially "search the internet by face"), car manufacturers collecting and selling location data, phone companies collecting and selling location data, ISPs collecting and selling browsing behavior, companies running mass surveillance on license plates and selling the data to law enforcement and really anyone who pays, some DNA sequencing related abuses that I don't remember the details of, all the data collected by the ad "ecosystem" (note that this still happens in GDPR-land because enforcement is lacking), this, ...
> By this logic: I suppose glassdoor, yelp, or Google reviews aren't legal either?
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
In this future that you want me to imagine, do you imagine, that I'm imagining that I am poor or I am rich? Because oh man, I didn't have much luck at the lottery or at blackjack or craps or startups or crypto, but I'm sure, this time, AI is gonna help me strike it rich!
I have not used the app nor read much about it but this guys talk about it: https://youtu.be/WjfpryoQ0Mk
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.
Companies aren't people (despite lots of people pretending they are).
It's exactly like Lulu which shutdown due to privacy issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu_(app)
Every couple years someone tries this and it immediately turns into a cesspool because no matter the good intentions of the makers, it attracts the worst kind of person as active users.
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.
These kinds of apps are already in existence across many cities in the world in the form of informal, invite-only WhatsApp and Telegram groups.
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.
"invite-only" is key because it requires a trust relationship, if not directly then through minimal degrees of separation. While not perfect they can basically work while apps for the general population cannot because there is no trust between the users.
Indeed. This trust is a critical point. The invitation mechanism is a web of trust. Not infallible but better than these apps that try to centralize that through identification.
> 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.
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.
Innocent people have killed themselves over this stuff. The mob don't care.
Based on some of the things I've seen in my professional and personal circles, I'd say there's much more than a chance, and the level of potential distortion is probably much greater, with more consequences, than some are acknowledging.
There needs to be a startup accelerator or VC that solely focuses on recycled ideas. We could have an app that gathers strangers for dinners, one for reviewing people, and so on. Since all of these gained traction at some point, the idea would be you get 1-2 quick puffs of these discarded cigarette butts before selling or shutting down. Just vibe code it, go viral, collect some subscriber fees, then close due to whatever reason.
We’ve already got one: YC
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41707495
TechStars already exists.
> Peeple failed because they couldn't eliminate bias and gossip against anyone
Without bias and gossip, who would even want to use the app?
Almost everyone? And not in a cheap throwaway comment way, I mean genuinely. The value is that it’s informative not a gossip rag.
I don't think you understand humans. Spicy social gossip is far more attractive to people rather than anything informative.
I believe that at least one person has gotten a posting removed about himself by complaining directly to Apple. He presumed that Tea wouldn't care.
https://x.com/JacobJohnson494/status/1948222924235624870
[flagged]
There are large Facebook groups dedicated to "Are we dating the same guy?" / "Are we dating the same woman?" that predate this app.
A lot of these groups have also had people get successfully sued for defamation.
I would imagine Tea enjoys protections from Section 230, same as all other social media sites.
This looks like a slam book. Or that’s what girls called it when I was in high school. Basically just a place where you write mean things about people you don’t like. And those people don’t get to see it.
Yes but if you brand it differently it's about safety!
Providing a platform for defamation and other tortious speech is generally legally protected under §230. They still have to respond to court orders and DMCA requests, though. This is how sites like Kiwi Farms remain online. That said, commercial apps can sometimes be sued under defective product laws.
“False slander” is not a thing.
The answer to your last two questions is found within section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
> “False slander” is not a thing.
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 is more a question of English than law. Slanderous statements are false by definition.
There are countries where "false defamation" could be a term of art. Japan, for instance, where spreading rumors about someone that hurt their reputation is actionable even if those rumors are true. If your boss is having an affair, for instance, and you tell all your coworkers, he can successfully sue you.
A gray area in my eyes. As a father, I think it's good that my daughter uses the app. You only need to look at the statistics to see how many women are killed by their male partners every year.
It's harmful to spread this kind of fear. Statistically it's less than 0.05% of women die because they are killed by their partner. This puts a stigma on men in general as some sort of dangerous savages.
> Statistically it's less than 0.05% of women die because they are killed by their partner.
2020 USA Per Capita Count of Mortality Event: Assault(Homicide), Female: 0.00139%
https://datacommons.org/tools/visualization#visType%3Dtimeli...
As a man, I find it absurd and even dangerous to not attach some stigma to men. That you feel the need to invoke "dangerous savages" is maybe your own prerogative, but by any sober and fact-based analysis it is indisputable that women are justified in acting cautiously when dealing with strange men.
mothers are more than twice as likely as fathers to kill their children. and the same is true for child abuse and neglect.
humans in general act like psychos, the danger comes more from the size differential than propensity to act like a jerk.
Most violence is perpetrated by men. If you're only response to that hard, cold fact is some stat about infanticide, maybe you're not honestly grappling with the issue.
And yet domestic violence is equally done by men and women, except that most men don't report the abuse because of people like you who act like it doesn't happen. It's disappointing.
You bring up fact based analyses. Let's see what they have to say.
> Over two hundred studies found that men and women perpetrate intimate partner violence at roughly equivalent rates, depending on where the samples are drawn from, and what level of violence is identified. (Dutton and Nicholls, 2005).
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog...
Most violence is perpetrated by men, but men are also equal victims.
I just looked it up, 5,000 women were the victims of homicide last year. 13,000 men were. So, unequal.
I'm justified in acting cautiously when dealing with strange pit bulls, too. That isn't the same as saying pit bulls deserve to be stigmatized. Or I don't think it is.
It's also leads to racism when people break down relationship violence by race. It's a dumb argument that helps no one
I think the problem is not the statement, but the conclusion.
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.
The statistics is a bit more complex and nuanced than giving straight answers. Studies looking at any form of violence in partner relationships shows both women and men having equal amount. When looking at physical violence, especially those that lead to people being charged with a crime, men are over-represented in heterosexual relationships.
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.
Not sure what is your point.
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.
The technical term of "any form of violence" seems to be Partner Abuse, and the definition is: "violence refers to behaviour within an intimate relationship that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including acts of physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours."
The primary motives are to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.
The highest rates are found in high school and college, and the majority of partner violence is bidirectional. (A meta study illustrating this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380231193440)
The idea that women are unable of violent behavior, or immune to wanting to take revenge for being emotional hurt or stressed, seems utterly unlikely. Especially young adults who might lack the tools and experience to avoid falling into violent responses.
To quote a different finding: Eight studies directly compared men and women in the power/control motive and subjected their findings to statistical analyses. Three reported no significant gender differences and one had mixed findings. One paper found that women were more motivated to perpetrate violence as a result of power/control than were men, and three found that men were more motivated; however, gender differences were weak
Asking if "men risk as much as women" is a very different question however. If a woman throws a knife at a man, and a man hits a woman in the face, who carry the highest risk? Statically, the fist is going to do significant more damage on average than the knife, as throwing a knife (especially a non-throwing knife), hitting the target, and creating damage is fairly unlikely for a non-proficient attacker. If the attacks was recorded on camera/witnessed, one would be an attack with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill, and the other would be physical assault.
The point is that partner violence is a complex problem, which only simple aspect being that both women and men are humans.
> Not sure what is your point.
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.
Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?
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.
> Why would it be the size of the specific two people in a relationship?
That's the main argument of the grandparent post. If you're missing that then you're not really responding to what they said.
They went into significant detail so I feel like trying to reword it myself would be worse than suggesting you read the post again.
> 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.
Nah. Root cause analysis is entirely different from risk analysis. This is about risk analysis. If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence? That's not the time to worry about why and how to fix society.
> maybe men behavior is different from women behavior
Maybe it is! But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post. Or you need to say the data is wrong. But you can't just dismiss it as being defensive.
> That's the main argument of the grandparent post.
Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.
> If a woman dates a man that's smaller than her, who should be more worried about violence?
I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent. You need something more. In this case, I think it's a culture that implies that violent men are manly and successful, which is present in the manosphere. Because there is no such culture (I guess you can find anecdotical case, far from being as common as the manosphere) that implies that women beating men is somehow "womenly", I doubt it implies that tall women will beat men at the same rate.
> But then you need a really good explanation for the data in the above post.
All the data adds up, everything is pretty well predicted by this model. Not sure which data you think this model does not explain (unless you think that somehow this model implies 0%-100%, which is of course not the case). On the other hand, I doubt anyone has ever proven that being taller in the relationship is really a strong causal factor (and not just correlation, as the manosphere is also into going to the gym) (but happy to get links if you have some).
> Exactly, and I've answered that saying I'm not convinced, so, I've asked you if you had further arguments. I've said at the time why it was not convincing, and I've built even more in my previous comment.
You never made it clear that you understood the argument, because you went straight from "Not sure what is your point" to "Why would it be". That doesn't look like a request for more convincing, that looks like you never considered it.
> I still think it's the woman, because not every parent beat their children despite them being smaller, which proves that being bigger does not mean being violent.
What. Not every dating relationship involves violence either. We're talking about what's more likely here.
Also children and dates are different in so many ways that even ignoring that factor this doesn't disprove the argument at all.
> Not sure which data you think this model does not explain
If the root cause is culture encouraging men to be physically violent, why would the total amount of physical violence be the same in gay relationships, especially lesbian ones?
I'm simply trying to have an enjoyable conversation where we all learn and understand each other. I was just saying "I'm not convinced by this, but maybe I did not understood" to avoid assuming incorrectly, and to invite non-confrontationally to clarify if I'm wrong and provide more arguments.
I'm not saying that the children example means that "every bigger persons will be violent towards a smaller person", I'm trying to explain that the children example means that "violence is not the result of being bigger, it's the result of the individual propensity to be violent, which itself depends a lot of the individual 'world view'". What I call here 'world view' is how the individual understand the world, their role in this world, what they can or cannot do, ... This is something built based on their parent education, but also their personal experience, what they absorb from the ambient culture and how they identify with different societal messages.
Such influence is taken as obvious in plenty of places: we don't question concepts like "different countries have different cultures and therefore people act differently", or "the education that this person has received had an impact in the way they act now", or ...
I find strange that, when it is a discussion that we can frame as "men vs women", these things that we immediately considered impactful in other situations are suddenly considered as totally non-impactful in this context.
Because of that, it feels unrealistic to pretend that women will obviously be as violent if they were stronger than men and that the only thing that stops them is them being smaller.
> If the root cause is culture encouraging men to be physically violent, why would the total amount of physical violence be the same in gay relationships, especially lesbian ones?
I've mentioned that (when I've said "if indeed it is cultural, it implies that different sub-culture may have different ways of acting"). The propensity of violence depends on the "world view", which itself depends on personal experience, what is the message the society send to the individual their role is, ...
In the case of lesbians:
1) I don't think we can easily say "it's the same". Some studies even say it's more, but then, how do you explain that with your model? But looking into it, it looks like the consensus is that it is a difficult study and that we don't have a good statistical significance: the consensus seems to be that concluding "it's the same" is not scientific right now, all we can say is "it may be the same, but it may also not be the same, we don't know yet".
2) The life experience, the social message they receive, the relationship dynamics, ... are quite different in lesbian couples and in heterosexual couples. And all of this affects the propensity to violence. I can understand that a group where the members grew up in a society that sends the message their sexual attraction is "wrong" or "deviant" does not have, for example, the same self-esteem than a group where it is not the case. It is not fair to pretend that lesbian couples have the same background and the same situation than heterosexual couples.
So, in the case of lesbians, the data you provide is not challenging my model: it can easily be that men may be more violent in heterosexual relationship because of sociocultural message (such as "getting angry is the manly way to deal with frustration") or sociocultural role (such as "men are the breadwinner and are focusing more on their career, so they have more pressure and snap differently than women"), while lesbians may be more violent because of their sociocultural message inside their own subculture (maybe? Maybe for example "in a lesbian couple, we expect to have a butch one and a dominated one") or their life experience (maybe? Maybe for example "low self-esteem of both the victim and the abuser leads to a relationship dynamic that facilitate violence").
I'm also interested to have more information about your view on the phenomenon like the manosphere. I don't think we have a "female manosphere" that promotes the same culture of violence towards the partner (I'm sure there are cases, but that is not at all the same order of magnitude in popularity and mainstreamness). Sure, the people who really fall for the manosphere rhetoric is a minority, but they are the extreme of a Gaussian curve that indicate that the mean value is not at the same place for men and for women. If it's the case, is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all (and if it has no impact at all, why people who defend that it has no impact will also be worried about "the image of the men" when it comes to talking about violence done by men? Why would be one message harmless and the other dangerous?)
> I'm simply trying to have an enjoyable conversation where we all learn and understand each other. I was just saying "I'm not convinced by this, but maybe I did not understood" to avoid assuming incorrectly, and to invite non-confrontationally to clarify if I'm wrong and provide more arguments.
That's reasonable as a goal but I implore you to be clearer next time. You didn't address the evidence they gave so I couldn't tell if you understood at all or if you though other evidence was more compelling.
> I'm trying to explain that the children example means that "violence is not the result of being bigger, it's the result of the individual propensity to be violent, which itself depends a lot of the individual 'world view'".
I don't think that's good enough evidence for such a strong claim. Not at all enough to say the size factor is flat-out disproven by it.
And overall I do think world view is important, but I bet physical size is a significant factor too unless the evidence above is extra bunk.
> I find strange that, when it is a discussion that we can frame as "men vs women", these things that we immediately considered impactful in other situations are suddenly considered as totally non-impactful in this context.
I'm not saying totally non impactful but it's unclear what percentage.
> Because of that, it feels unrealistic to pretend that women will obviously be as violent if they were stronger than men and that the only thing that stops them is them being smaller.
The statistics given are not based on pretending.
> it looks like the consensus is that it is a difficult study and that we don't have a good statistical significance
That is a much better argument.
> while lesbians may be more violent because of their sociocultural message inside their own subculture (maybe? Maybe for example "in a lesbian couple, we expect to have a butch one and a dominated one") or their life experience (maybe? Maybe for example "low self-esteem of both the victim and the abuser leads to a relationship dynamic that facilitate violence").
Edited this line to make it clearer: Maybe but looking at that level of complication still makes it harder to evaluate man versus woman in any random relationship, especially those very individual life experience factors that can affect anyone.
> I'm also interested to have more information about your view on the phenomenon like the manosphere. [...] is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all
I'm not sure how much it impacts violence in particular, shrug. But whatever effect it has is divided by the relative rarity of believers.
> If it's the case, is it really realistic to just pretend it has no impact at all (and if it has no impact at all, why people who defend that it has no impact will also be worried about "the image of the men" when it comes to talking about violence done by men? Why would be one message harmless and the other dangerous?)
Listen, I haven't heard this debate before, and I'm not taking part in it, but your comparison here isn't reasonable. Asking if one message increases violence and asking if the other message hurts someone's image are completely different things. If someone says no and yes respectively there's no hypocrisy.
> but I implore you to be clearer next time. You didn't address the evidence they gave
I did: I even quoted that part in my previous comment: this part is indeed in the first comment (the sentence starting with " Secondly, if indeed it is cultural, ..." that explains why the data does not prove the conclusion they proposed). But it does not matter, I think we cleared this.
> I don't think that's good enough evidence for such a strong claim.
The children example is not an evidence for a claim.
If you say "I only saw black cats, so all cats are black", I can answer "I'm not convinced, maybe you just saw black cats but non-black cats exist, after all, other animals, like dogs, horses, cows, ... have different color". You now say "the fact that dogs have different colors is not a proof". Of course it's not, nobody pretended it was. I just explain why the initial claim is not convincing. I'm not the one making any claim, I'm just saying that this claim is just a guess and that there are different models that explain the situation as accurately (or maybe even more accurately, as they are also compatible with other behaviors, while the presented model still need to explain why some mechanisms exist in some situation and suddenly disappear in others).
> Maybe but looking at that level of complication still makes it harder to evaluate man versus woman in any random relationship
And so is the reality: it is hard to evaluate man vs woman in any random relationship. Is your point that it is not the case? Or that we should reject models that imply that just because you prefer models more convenient? "Sure, quantum mechanism is interesting, but it makes things more complicated, so let's just pretend it is incorrect"
> But whatever effect it has is divided by the relative rarity of believers.
That is not at all what I say. I explain it in the ellipsis you removed from your quote. I'm saying that the extreme of the distribution shows that we cannot simply assume that the mean is at the same place. For example, women lives older than men, and you can also see it by looking at the very old persons: they are extremely rare, but yet, women are more common.
I don't say at all that violence against women is due to manosphere, the same way I'm not saying that if you ignore people older than 100 years, you will not see any life-expectancy difference between men and women.
What I was saying is that, culturally, "men behaving towards women in ways that may lead to violence" is more assimilated as normal in our society than "women behaving towards men in the same ways". The manosphere is the extreme, as is "people older than 115 year old", but the fact that the manosphere is only about "men towards women" and that there no significant equivalent "women towards men" shows that the average assimilation of default behaviors are different.
> but your comparison here isn't reasonable
I'm not comparing the two.
What I don't understand is that on one hand, the claim is that violence is mainly due to a "mechanical fixed parameter" such as the size of the person and that societal messaging has no significant impact. But that on the other hand, these people are also saying that it is very bad that we hurt the image of men, because societal message has consequence.
> "I'm not convinced, maybe you just saw black cats but non-black cats exist, after all, other animals, like dogs, horses, cows, ... have different color".
Well the actual argument wasn't nearly as extreme as "only black fur", and a better (but still messy) analogy would be you citing one other animal and we don't have good stats for any other kinds of animal either. That's part of why I'm saying the child example isn't very good at affecting convincedness.
Also you used the word "proves", I feel like if you say X proves Y then it's not weird for me to call that a "claim". I don't think "I'm not the one making any claim" is valid here; you're responding to the original claim with arguments that include your own claims.
> there are different models that explain the situation as accurately
I'd say that so far none of the models here reach "very convincing" for all the data at hand. They're all big maybes.
> I'm saying that the extreme of the distribution shows that we cannot simply assume that the mean is at the same place.
Well even with a completely isolated size factor, the means are different. I don't think anyone was saying that.
And sure the distributions might have different shapes. There's a lot of analysis here that hasn't been done.
> What I don't understand is that on one hand, the claim is that violence is mainly due to a "mechanical fixed parameter" such as the size of the person and that societal messaging has no significant impact.
That's too binary. One thing can be the main effect while another is still quite significant. Like 75/25 just to toss out a number.
The places I've used "prove" are in totally different contexts that the context in which you pretended I was claiming some proof.
For the rest, it feels like you are moving the goalpost. The initial discussion was about the fact that if there is an impact of the societal messaging, it is smart to acknowledge that (and I insisted that it should still be done carefully). If now you are saying 75/25, then you are still saying that the societal messaging has an impact. Therefore I still think it's smart to acknowledge it.
(I understand the objection that it may be too dangerous, but unfortunately you did not go into this direction. I come back on that on my last paragraph.)
Why this impression? Your initial main argument was initially resting on "lesbian couples have the same amount of violence", but this argument does not make sense if it is 75/25: if there is a 25% effect, what does observing the same rate means? If you observe exactly the same rate, does it mean that we have a societal impact that somehow canceled itself, or does it means that in fact the "natural rate of violence from women" is less than men (the exact thing you pretend this data proves impossible), but that the societal impact increases it up to reach the same value? If indeed you believe in the 75/25, then the "same rate amongst lesbians" cannot prove anything. And on top of that, now, you also need to justify why it is 75/25 and not 85/15 or 65/35, and the whole argument seems to be "it's my gut feeling" (not that it is bad in itself, but then you cannot use that as basis to pretend that the lesbian data proves something).
I can be wrong, but because of that, it feels to me that you were not really agreeing to 75/25 at the beginning of the discussion (otherwise you would not have used the "lesbian rate" argument as you had), but now that the discussion advanced, you are making some concessions but still try to find some reasons why the conclusion you prefer is still valid. If my impression is correct, it means that instead of looking at the arguments first and reaching the conclusion based on the arguments, you start with the conclusion that you prefer, and build arguments in order to defend this conclusion.
(and I understand that you instinctively prefer the conclusion where we avoid acknowledging that there is something specific to men, it's not a comfortable prospect)
I've mentioned that we could have discussed around the danger of acknowledging. Unfortunately, if now we start discussing that, it will just reinforce my feeling that you jump to another thread now that one ran its course because you want to defend the conclusion you like.
So, yeah, I guess there is not much more to add here.
Men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes than women
Yes, primarily by other men as we all know.
Not sure what is your point?
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.
The context was a dating app. And yes, men are also victims by men.
Race is America is extremely idiosyncratic. Gender relations exhibit a far more consistent dynamic cross-culturally.
Calling it "extremely idiosyncratic" is not indicative of reality:
> 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...
You misunderstood my comment and instead gave examples that further support the idea that race relations in America are unique and particular to our history and geography. That's why race statistics in the US are not well-suited for cross-cultural comparison, let alone for drawing gargantuan conclusions about inherent racial traits (as racists are often looking to do).
The risk of females being murdered by an intimate partner is five times higher than for males. And murder is just the very end of the spectrum. And by definition, calling out men, is not racism.
Are there other groups that are 5x more likely to commit murder? Even if there are, IMO we shouldn't judge every member of that group for the actions of a small minority
Are we still talking about a App that helps with dating?
It's better to think in terms of overall life damage and "quality of life years lost". I think it's very debatable which side loses more from getting involved in relationships.
In my opinion, it's dangerous to consider absolute numbers alone in this context. Saying something like, "Less than 0.02% of paragliders die because of the sport," can be misleading. When nn reality, the chance of dying from paragliding is 1000 times higher than in football. When I choose my next hobby, this information is very useful.
Statistically that is a rather small number. But if we take the number of women in say, America, a web search says 334.9 million. 0.05% of that is 167,450. That is quite a lot of women being killed by their partner.
According to the UNODC[1], in 2023, the rate of all murders of women in the US was 0.00205%. (2.05 per 100,000) Partner violence appears to account for ~34% of violence against women[2] (but vs. 6% for men), so that would be 0.697 per 100k or ~0.0007%, or ~1190 women/yr in the US[3]. Assuming I've done the math right… the risk is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than what you came up with.
> 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.)
> when you cut the stat this way, it seems like men are wildly dangerous creeps.
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.
> the number of women in say, America, a web search says 334.9 million
Doesn't look correct.
USA population is c.350M total, so they're probably off by half.
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/us-demographics/
That looks like the general population of the US, and is out of date, it’s 340m+
5k women are murdered in America each year, fwiw.
18k men are murdered. But women are murdered by their partners at a higher rate.
How many men are murdered by their partner's other or would-be partners? Not none.
Is suicide not counted in any way? A significant other or their loss will have a significant impact on mental health.
I don't know were you have this numbers from, but in 2021 34% of women were killed by partner and 76% of women where killed by a known person (family, friends, colleges, partner) [1].
Edit: 100% are murder victims
https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offende...
That’s out of women who were murdered or killed in manslaughter cases. OP was talking about base rates. 5000/170000000 is about 0.03%.
Your wording here is clumsy. You're saying that 34% of the adult female population was murdered by their partner. I'm assuming you meant female murder victims and not women in general?
To clarify, its about murdered victims. I thought this was clear. I thought we are still talking about partnership and dating.
I think poster is looking at mortality risk, not mortality cause.
Your stats are for murder victims. I assume that the parent poster was talking about all causes of death.
I have no idea if their number is correct for that either.
Could be. But I'm not. And the context is App for dating.
>But I'm not.
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.
I don't want to imply that someone tried to find the smallest possible number in order to deliberately misunderstand my comment, but we are still in the context of the dating app.
I keep seeing the defense for Tea as an app for women’s safety, which is of course a valid concern. Wouldn’t it make more sense for a service to exist, like some kind of enforcement service provided by the government, where others can report safety concerns and that service goes and does something about it legally?
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
> Wouldn’t it make more sense for a service to exist, like some kind of enforcement service provided by the government, where others can report safety concerns and that service goes and does something about it legally?
I think this is called "the police"
It seems you’ve discovered my point
No it's called sarcasm
Online men-dominated forums often dislike and feel personally attacked by people talking about sexual abuse/harassment done by other men. I guess they immediately imagine themselves being falsely accused of such acts, rather than being a woman that is attacked.
Right. Generally, people don't like things that can only negatively impact them.
I think groups in general feel personally attacked by things that attack people on the basis of their immutable group characteristics. Notably women dislike and feel attacked by unqualified statements like "women are crazy" or calling someone a "karen". Black people dislike and feel attacked when people talk about "ghetto trash" or "welfare queens".
Sure any individual discussion about an individual might justifiably refer to that person as "crazy" or "ghetto trash". But the nature of online spaces, and the nature of the public discourse that tends to bring these phrases and discussions into the public eye very quickly starts painting people with broad brushes.
People also feel attacked because often times discussions tend to confuse useful rhetorical devices for conveying a point with justification for a behavior that has harmful impacts on the broader group. For example, it was pretty common to here the "bowl of M&Ms where one M&M is poisoned" analogy in the height of the "Me Too" movement. It's a useful rhetorical device for explaining why someone would fell cautious about a strange man, and why they wouldn't start from a position of trust. But it's also a terrible way of generally treating men in your life, and a terrible broad philosophy for organizations and governments to follow.
And we know this rhetorical device makes bad policy and at large is harmful to innocent people because another time in recent history when that analogy was really popular was immediately after the Sept 11 attacks when talking about Muslims in general and immigrants from Muslim countries. Surely no one would find it strange that Muslims might dislike and feel personally attacked by "people talking about crimes and terrorism done by other Muslims" in the same way that many online spaces talk about "sexual abuse/harassment done by other men". Surely we wouldn't be surprised if people felt attacked or disliked an app for sharing anonymous and private information about suspicious Muslims right? Or let's say someone noticed that black people are statistically 2x as likely relative to their population to be the offender of a violent crime[1]. You'd reasonably expect people to be bothered by an app that excluded black people from signing up and was entirely about strangers providing un-verified experiences with black people under the premise of keeping people safe.
Ultimately, people are bad at statistics and really bad at understanding the degree to which a small minority of individuals can affect a large majority of people by virtue of repeat offending. So it can be true both that lots of people have completely valid awful experiences with members of a given broad group, and that members of that group feel unfairly maligned when discussion about those experiences paints with broad, unqualified strokes.
[1]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv23.pdf
Women talking about their history sexual violence do not attack you or group you are a part of. Bringing some of these normalised actions to light do not attack you unless you’re a rapist yourself.
With a statement like: “men have caused countless wars in the world and created an incredible amount of suffering and injustice as a result.” No “normal” man would feel addressed and say “But women ...”
You are probably unaware of unintended consequences enabled by this app - many women use it to find bad boys they feel attracted to due to some brokenness in female psyche. So you'll get public outrage on one hand and private DMs on the other from them, based on how bad you are described/vetted by other women on the app.
If you had a son, would you think it's good spiteful women from his past were labeling him some kind of abuser on TEA when he has no way to know these allegations even exist?
You still think so?
I wonder how well-received this comment would be if it mentioned crime statistics regarding something else than gender.
Not only that, I think they're forfeit their Section 230 protections since they're exercising editorial control by excluding males from the platform. So they'd be directly liable for any defamation they publish on their platform.
It would be in Apple and Google’s best interest to pull these apps immediately. Multiple Supreme Court justices have indicated an interest in narrowing the breadth of section 230 immunity. This app, structured entirely around effecting the reputation of private individuals, provides a relatively clean case to do so. It’s not a stretch that the app could be considered a ‘developer in part’ of the content it hosts, and thus lose section 230 protection.
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.
That's not how 230 works - why do people keep parroting this misinformation?
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
It continues to confuse me that the publisher/distributor distinction that section 230 was meant to remove (created by prior Federal court decisions) gets so frequently interpreted as if section 230 had been intended to establish it.
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.
Thanks for posting the link. I had read that before and forgot.
I think sometimes confusion about Section 230 maybe points to some legal soft spots.
I think there's a trend — good or bad — for courts to see websites as accountable for users' activities on the site when those activities are systematic and collectively illegal or jeopardized, when the website is seen as encouraging the activity.
It's not hard for me to imagine a court deciding that the intrinsic nature of the website encourages systematic libel, and is therefore is somehow involved in the creation of post content.
Even more specifically, I'm not sure the "good faith" clause of Section 230 even applies to something like Tea in the case of libel, should libel be there.
Now, actually showing libel is another thing, but that's also easier for me to imagine today than even a year ago, especially in the presence of a data breach where posters are exposed.
I guess I don't see Tea as being held legally responsible for anything about the content of user posts, in the US at least, for the reasons outlined in that article. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it did happen.
Because it's really good misinformation, thanks for the link. I had no idea that it was effectively unconditional protection.
> I had no idea that it was effectively unconditional protection.
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.
Huge credit for actually updating in response to evidence.
Because they seem to want it to work that way and seem to think that by spreading the misinformation that it will somehow change the way the law is interpreted.
We need to stop allowing companies that are not directly engaged in financial services to request government IDs.
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.
Unfortunately for some of us, the UK has gone the opposite direction. We now have to verify our age (or use a VPN) before accessing certain websites.
https://theconversation.com/porn-websites-now-require-age-ve...
This is fine if you have a secure tool to access. It's not okay if you just try to spin up your own solution.
There is no "secure tool", there is no secure way to verify ID online right now, none of these companies can be trusted to do it properly. Just last week a bunch of my personal info was implicated in a breach of a background check company who supposedly knew what they were doing.
A private way of doing this is absolutely 100% viable with some cryptography and government support. Apparently nobody gives enough of a fuck to even try.
As for the UK's new 'porn ID' law, people are going to die. People will take their own lives when their porn browsing habits are inevitably leaked. Private companies cannot be trusted to keep their hand out of the cookie jar, they WILL link peoples' histories to their real IDs.
How hard would it be to securely receive an image, securely check that image against a database, return an answer, and then delete the image securely?
Of all the things we do, it doesn't sound that difficult, to be honest.
A secure Know Your Customer API would be a useful service for Apple and Google to provide to developers. It could scan the ID and reveal individual pieces of information with permission to the application or multiple applications. Forgive me if it already exists and this app just wasn’t using it.
Apple is launching such a service in iOS26
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/
Ah, nice that it's a web standard. Looks like Google is as well. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
Link to the related web standard https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/
This is mDL (mobile driver's license) here in the US, but it's a new technology and not widely available or adopted yet. https://www.nccoe.nist.gov/projects/digital-identities-mdl
Interesting; thanks. That should connect to browsers' Digital Credentials API the other user mentioned.
Or we could deny providing "app" developers with any such information.
I am not going to show my ID to Google, especially given that it is a foreign company with dubious data collection history.
You are going to show your ID to at least one foreign company with dubious data collection history, because the government will eventually force it on you.
There are verifiable credentials protocols which would let a site to check something (and prove that they checked it) without de-anonymizing the user.
It can be done with fairly basic cryptography. But the infrastructure around it would grow only if there's a demand. Otherwise people go with lowest denominator.
The crimes of creating or posessing a fake ID are distinct from the crime of knowingly using one, an act which has the peculiar name "uttering".
Simple solution: decriminalize uttering to any person who is not an employee of the government or a regulated bank.
Shouldn’t a single mention of sex details make this a pornographic site, and thus subject to 18+ non-anonymous registration?
Good lord, why would they store those drivers' license images for an instant longer than it took to verify their users?
This. Appropriate regulation should make this an offense punishable by a large fine. There is almost no consequence to companies for bad practices.
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.
Absent broader regulation, we all know that apps like Tea depend HEAVILY on user trust. However, I am a bit concerned users either won't fully grasp the severity of this breach or won't care enough and end up sticking with the app regardless.
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.
"They just trust me. Dumb f*cks.."
Or maybe require them to prominently disclose the breech to all current and future users on the app main screen for some period of time afterward (a year or two?). Sort of like the health-code inspection ratings posted in restaurant windows.
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.
Companies, especially American ones, see data as an asset, rather than a liability.
The GDPR in Europe attempts to reset this but it’s still an uphill battle
> Appropriate regulation should make this an offense punishable by a large fine.
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.
I would at least love to see a public postmortem. What was the developer's rationale for storing extremely personal user data unencrypted, in a publicly facing database? How many layers of management approved storing extremely personal user data unencrypted, in a publicly facing database? What amount of testing was done that failed to figure out that extremely personal user data was stored unencrypted, in a publicly facing database?
>What was the developer's rationale for storing extremely personal user data unencrypted, in a publicly facing database?
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.
Wow, so the entire company is a Founder and a Social Media Director??
> 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.
Requiring a 3rd-party auditor perform a postmortem whose results are posted publicly might be an interesting regulatory approach to this. Companies get shamed for their mistakes, and also the rest of the industry learns more about which practices are safe and which are dangerous. A bit like NTSB investigation reports, for example.
In the US, professional certifications (PE, Bar, USMLE, CPA) exist to partially solve this problem when the certification is required to perform work legally. These are typically required in industries where lives and livelihoods of individuals and the public are at risk based on the decisions of the professional.
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.
They shouldn't, but it appears to be a gossip app where by design they're also storing photos taken of other people (permission or not) and gossip about them...
They don't seem to value privacy.
I am just making a wild guess with no evidence to back it up, but I have a question and a potential answer:
How was this app going to monetize?
I'm guessing by selling user data, namely drivers license info to phone number.
According to another media report, the approval queue for new account verification was seventeen hours long. It's possible what the 4channers got was that approval queue.
No they got more, 23gb of files.
That's only a partial archive. There's another one with 55gb.
This is what vibe coding gets us!
Not a fan of the "vibe coding" hype, but is there any evidence that this app was built that way?
The cynical part of me feels like certain employees had uncontrolled access to the user data.
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.
Honestly it doesn't matter that they didn't have that additional nefarious intent their incompetence and carelessness drove to the same result.
We really need to get used to treating PII as poison, storing as little of it as possible, and getting rid of it as soon as we're done with it.
I think we can treat it as currency. All nine letters of my SSN, for example, I’ll allow you to store those if in return I get to store the name of the CEO’s boat.
People keep bitching about EU's GDPR but most of it is about sensible things like not storing sensitive data forever just because you can.
Nothing happens to these companies if there are no laws to keep them accountable, most companies I've worked with store everything forever because it's cheap and you never know what might become useful or what you might be able to sell to third parties later
Not sure, but think this may have been the original thread: https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/511313558
>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.
The irony of a doxxing app being wrecked by the anonymous is too much for me!
This is not irony.
California car dealerships are sometimes visited by the DMV inspector, an actual officer of some kind technically.
If they find any driver license photo copies, even turned over inside an unlocked desk drawer, the fine to a dealership is $10k per occurrence.
Is it weird that internet companies do not have this kind of oversight?
how much money can their lobbiests throw at the gub'mnt compared to the US car dealership associations?
Car dealership associations have pretty impressive lobbying capabilities. In many (most?) states you must buy a new vehicle from a dealer - it's against the law to buy direct from the manufacturer.
FYI the original post of the thread is now "This post is not available at this time."
> 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.
Good analogy. Also, this is the main point of the EU GDPR.
> That app made a lot of basement dwelling chuds furious, to the point that someone was willing to risk prison time for a shot at harming those women.
Although undeniably, the data being mostly women does bring in the chuds so it's not entirely wrong, I think this is a shallow take for a couple of reasons:
1. If any app stored user data this freely, it would be stolen and gloated over on 4chan.
2. This app, which I'm learning about just now, seems deeply problematic. It's a place for people to publically share and shame other people that they don't like. The genders of the people doing this doesn't matter, this is called doxxing and it's not ok, no matter how it gets dressed up (women's safety, children's safety, anti-terrorism, anti-drugs, whatever)
It is, in the EU.
Are you being serious right now? No one forced those people to upload their data to this sketchy site. Everyone with one brain cell would know the repercussions of uploading IDs to a no-name site
Exactly, this is why if I walk down a street that looks sketchy and I get assaulted/robbed, it’s not a crime and no one can be charged!
Any bad behavior should be legal if the victim should have realized the warning signs.
"No one forced these people to get on that non-airworthy airplane."
People should not have to understand every technical field in order to participate in society. This is what regulatory bodies are for.
Look at what this site does.
You upload other people’s personal information on it to run background checks on them.
So, many of the victims probably haven’t heard of the company.
i think you are assuming a level of computer literacy that doesn't exist in the general population. most people seem to not actually know where data goes when they put it in their phone, how that data is used, or what actually happens on computers in general. They mostly appear as magic to them.
"Do not share personal information online" is a warning that has been heeded since the internet was created. You don't need tech savvy to understand that message, just as you don't need to know anything about zoos to understand "Do not enter the lion cage".
With tech savvy it is possible to understand the dangers well enough to dismiss the common advice in certain cases, but if you don't have it — you had better listen to what others are telling you. If you wish to dismiss it, you are on your own.
The problem is as follows: There is a subset of the population that tends to trust things you say, and this subset is fairly large.
The solution is that we need to make it so that the majority no longer trusts anything people say.
There will be no negative knock-on effects for this, I'm sure.
--
To be less glib, I don't really see a good outcome of this in the long term. If everyone developed the right level of op-sec given the amount of bad actors on the internet, we'd effectively never communicate with another person again.
I can totally imagine our intel agencies and foreign state actors having a field day with this, as mirrored here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWTyvvb8GFs
I am being downvoted for being real. How is the general populous not aware of it? That's wild. Again, you have to be aware of this. It's like privacy 101
The general population hasn't taken privacy 101. They get asked to email their id to their doctor. If turns out the doctor also hasn't taken privacy 101.
Naw. That’s victim blaming. People have a right to believe that if an online service or app requires identify verification that the data will be protected. If you provide your credit card to uber you assume they put a password on the database and do the things required to protect it.
The idiot no-technical founder failed to do even the most simple and obvious data protection.
Vibecoding is not an excuse. Ask how to secure the data and the AI will answer.
Victim blaming isn't right. Yes, they could have exhibited more caution. No, it's not their fault.
It's the only way people learn. Real world is not going to hold your hand, real world is full of facebooks, not signals
Of course it is right. Victims need to be blamed, else they'll just stupidly do it again. That’s what “blame” is for. But, sure, if 'Tea' snuck up behind these people then there would be some room for sympathy.
But this case is more like you sticking your fingers into an electrical socket, after being warned continuously not to do that, and then crying that it was the utility company's fault for putting something dangerous in your face.
We've been told since the advent of the internet to not share personal information online. If you want to take the risk, you have to accept the consequences. However, in this case the story is even worse as the intent of these people was to violate that rule not just for themselves but for other people as well.
If I lend you my car, and you park in Berkeley leaving your laptop open on the passenger seat... Yes it's your fault my window got smashed and I'd like you to pay for it. Is it your fault your laptop got stolen? Maybe, that's just semantics. But my window being broken is your fault because we all know thieves exist and look for items on seats.
So if you upload your id to a flash in the pan website, who's fault is it when the rookie website turns out to have expectedly low security?
The car was at least be locked and have windows closed. In this case, it was an unlocked car with doors and windows open.
Vigilante justice is wrong, but at the same time, I have a hard time calling registered users of a Kiwi Farms clone "victims."
Wait, the app does what?
> 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.
You can use that app in different ways:
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.
That's PR speak for saying that it's a Kiwi Farms clone. I'm sure the two userbases even share their sense of righteousness regarding their own actions.
This case couldn't be more clear cut. It's horrid, and the people running the sites should be held accountable. Two wrongs don't make a right, especially when it will inevitably cost innocent lives, sooner or later.
you forgot the most common use cases in practice: a man you work with slighted you in some small way. now hes going to have sexual assault red flags. the HR lady who already hates men will look you up on tea and decline to hire you because you dont have green flags.
In other words it's a slander platform. Got it.
3) You’re in competition with someone at work and you want to make his life difficult. You want to blackmail someone into promoting you, etc.
Gossip about the opposite sex is probably the world's oldest social activity. The problem is that the internet lets it happen at industrial scale, and obviously that can be misused or have dangerous unintended consequences.
it also doesn't disappear. Before the internet you could say something, laugh, and move on. It disappeared.
Now if someone says something online it can be read for years and often without context of when it was originally written.
It's the digital version of a whisper network. Whisper networks have been around as long as humans. Informal ways for people (often women) to share warnings will always self assemble when formal systems don’t protect them.
That said, you;re right to raise concerns about consent and the ethics of sharing information about people without their knowledge. These systems inherently involve trade-offs. When the risk is violence or death, the cost of a false negative (saying nothing) is obvious. So people naturally lean toward maximizing sensitivity, even if that means lower specificity. That;s not ideal, but it's understandable in a world where formal accountability is inconsistent at best, and finding out after the fact isn't an option.
Their existence reflects a failure elsewhere. If we want to reduce the need for them, the solution isn't to shut them down but to make them obsolete. The solution is building systems and cultural norms where violence and coercion are reliably called out and acted upon.
If that idea feels scary or unfair, that's the emotional context many women are already living in. Understanding that is the first step toward addressing why these networks exist in the first place.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_network
Maybe this is a good time to think about what policy could help discourage these horrific practices (it sounds like their storage was unprotected)
* 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.
Make company liable for damages when breached.
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.
There has to be a better way than just adding another deterrent to starting a company. Could there be an industry standard for storage security? Certification (a known hurdle) is better than "don't fuck up or we'll fine you to death".
Regulate software development. Other industries already do this.
You could: - make Software Engineer a protected title that requires formal engineering education and mentorship as well as membership to your country's professional engineering body (Canada already does this) - make collecting and storing PII illegal unless done by a certified Software Engineer - add legal responsibility to certified Software Engineers. If a beach like this happens they lose their license or go to jail. And you easily know who is responsible for it because it's the PEng's name on the project - magically, nobody wants to collect PII insecurely anymore or hire vibe coders or give idiots access to push insecure stuff - bonus: being a certified Software Engineer now boosts your salary by 5x and the only people that will do it actually know WTF they are doing instead of cowboys, and that company will never hire a cowboy because of liability. The entire Internet is now more secure, more profitable for professionals, and dumb AI junk goes in the trash
For writing lists with one item per line, Use two line breaks on HN to start a new line
Like this
Canada does this but it is barely enforced.
Many non-certified people call themselves "software engineers" with no consequence.
I think fines are very reasonable. If you can’t safely do the thing, you should be punished for doing it. If you can’t safely safely do the thing then there is no issue.
Certification is essentially "don't fuck up or we'll fine you to death" with extra steps. Especially because it mostly comes down to the company self-verifying (auditors mostly just verify you are following whatever you say you are following, not that its a good idea).
Its not like anyone intentionally posts their entire DB to the internet.
Those extra steps help insult from penalties and lawsuits in a lot of cases.
Professional Engineer (PE) certification for cyber security professionals would help.
Without personal and professional consequences, the default 1 year of credit monitoring for weak security is just the cost of doing business.
How would that help?
By all accounts this app has no security professionals involved with it.
Its not like there was some incompetent cyber security expert saying its ok to skip ACLs in firebase.
This is the only way to deter this. Negligence and incompetence needs to cost companies big money, business-ruining amounts of money, or this is just going to keep happening.
> Make company liable for damages when breached.
This won't be enough, you have to make PEOPLE liable for breach.
Making a corporation being liable is useless, it's a legal Person and it can simply declare bankruptcy and move on.
the problem is what are the damages? how much are those damages?
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?
I would suggest that damages should be punative, not to make the victims whole. So i dont think it matters.
Punitive damages are no-go in Europe given they would mostly result in money transfers from the ruling families to common people.
Have you seen the GDPR? Its basically the definition of punative damages.
I agree, but relying on lawsuits is far too slow and costly . We can reduce the latency of discovery and resolution by adding software protocols.
Having the threat of lawsuits is not really about the actual lawsuit, its about scaring people into being more careful. If you actually get to the lawsuit stage, the strategy has failed.
> 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.]
The signatures would appear in the drop . A primitive version would be file meta data or jfif. Even the images themselves or steganography could be used
I guess, but it seems a bit like a solution that only works for this specific dump - most db breaches don't have photos in them.
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.
dark web scanning is common. the developers would be notified when those signatures appear in dark web indexes .
jfif is just an example. any file format or metadata could be used as a signature depending on the storage type.
There is no indication that this particular breach was ever on the "dark web" before widely being discovered.
Yes dark web scanners are a thing, but just because something exists does not mean it would work for a specific situation. I'm doubtful they would work most of the time.
That's a reactive measure. Certainly, it's worth pursuing. Though like the notion that you can't protect people from being murdered if you only focus on arresting murderers, there is a need for a preventative solution as well.
Maybe the idiot that published this didn't even form an llc, "waste of 200$"
GDPR makes company liable for damages when breached.
That is why Tea did not operate in Europe.
just use your brain and don't upload your face and driver's license to a gossip website. when I was growing up, it was common knowledge that you shouldn't post your identity online outside of a professional setting.
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.
> just use your brain and don't upload your face and driver's license to a gossip website
Meanwhile, in the UK, new legislation requires me to upload my face and driver's license just to browse Reddit.
The fact that UK politicians cannot use their brains is a separate issue. May I interest you in a VPN?
You only require ID verification for NSFW subreddits, right?
Nsfw includes subreddits that discuss beer.
You know, what's funny about NSFW is that a lot of things tagged NSFW are actually regularly discussed at work!
While true, using that logic I can say porn is also discussed at work if you work in the porn industry :)
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).
All of Reddit is NSFW. Why are you on Reddit, you should be working!
And requiring KYC to access a subreddit marked NSFW is somehow legitimate why, exactly?
Subreddits now 18-only in the UK now include:
r/ukguns r/cider r/sexualassault r/stopsmoking
Think of the children!
>just use your brain and don't upload your face and driver's license to a gossip website.
It isn't just gossip websites requiring this, and it isn't just gossip websites suffering breaches.
This is becoming more unfeasible as it becomes required to access online services like reddit, nexusmods, verification on dating apps. Sending facial, and documentation data is becoming mandated by governments across the world.
The app store is auditing & restricting functionality within the iPhone, but the backend protections are a wild west.
"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
Good thing our children will learn all about this at their mandatory Internet Literacy Fundamentals course they have to take in high school.
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.
education is helpful, but it's also inadequate. we need good drivers, and good driver safety systems. they go hand in hand.
even the most savvy consumers slip up, or are in a hurry. it's impossible to make a perfect security decision every time
Yeah, just upload the pictures of unsuspecting guys.
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.
Nice, some unsolicited victim blaming!
In this case it appears to be a public Firebase bucket; shutting down the app wouldn't help. Quite possibly access to Firebase was mediated through a backend service and Apple couldn't validate the security of the unknown bucket anyway.
Also about validating the backends, apple has the resources to provide a level of auditing over the common backends. S3, Firebase -- perhaps the top 5. It's easy to provide apple with limited access to query backend metadata and confirm common misconfigurations.
I partially agree. At least the threat of app shutdown would be enough consequence for the publisher to take things seriously
I think iOS and Android already holds the threat of app store removal over developers' heads.
Presumably the risk/reward still favors risky practices.
but it's not contingent on backend violations, only frontend ones. I'm proposing decoupled ways for app store validation to audit backend security.
> Publisher is required to include their own sensitive records within their backend.
Now that's a creative solution! Every admin must have a table called `MY_PERSONAL_INFO` in their DB.
wouldn't it be funny if the app store had to review it and make sure the personal info was sensitive and possibly humiliating enough . "sir your app has been denied because MY_PERSONAL_INFO table requires at least 3 d-pics"
More power to app store reviewers? Please no. They already deny apps for random reasons and figuring out why is often a hair pulling experience.
i agree about the power concerns, but where would you assign the authority if not the app store?
This is the kind of thing government regulation is useful for, when it works.
In practice they delegate certification to a legacy and expensive certification authority
* Mandate 3rd party auditing once an app reaches > 10k users
* 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
> * Mandate 3rd party auditing once an app exceeds 10k users
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.
also i remember maybe Facebook trying to do this when they acquired Parse. For a while they were promoting developers host their backends on Parse / FB .
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.
thanks. Yeah I think there are a lot of ways to decouple App store from publisher and auditor . That way the publisher can retain autonomy / control , while still developing trust with the consumer.
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.
Yes, pushing companies away from mobile apps and towards PWAs or even ordinary websites does sound like an excellent idea.
it could be an enhanced certification like "Enhanced SEcurity" or "End to End security" to allow gradual adoption.
So like those EV certs that turn the address bar green.
better, in that the app store has more weight and more leverage to establish more comprehensive auditing.
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.
The world is moving away from App Stores and walled gardens. Figure out other options.
The world was moving away from App Stores and walled gardens. And then I woke up, and returned to grim reality.
that sounds preposterous . can you qualify that?
Linux is up to 5% of the desktop. Gog and Itch.io are DRM-free, and are slowly gaining ground against Steam. Fediverse networks are slowly gaining ground against traditional social media. Signal is more popular then ever.
There will always be lowest-common-denominator users, but there is clearly some demand for an alternative to the biggest 5 websites...
>There will always be lowest-common-denominator users,
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.
I wasn't intending to insult anyone, just to refer to most users as "people who don't want to think about the tools they use, and don't care about privacy". Which i think is true of most people. I never called anyone a moron, they just have different priorities.
Meanwhile, an Android app for some random banking or government thing will require an attested boot chain measured all the way down to the stage 0 ROM burned into the SOC. That's not to say the open ecosystem isn't better, but to say it's winning enough to guarantee sustained general purpose viability is simply untrue.
>Apt install app
Mmmhmm
i see thanks for clarifying
>* 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.
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.
it could be made available just to apple servers via ACL or protected token. but no one else .
That still doesn't make sense. How does the ACL work? What prevents the usual shenanigans like cloaking to prevent legitimate detection from working? Moreover what secrets are you even trying to detect? The app API token?
I like the ctf one, but it would probably be hidden way deeper than the rest of the info.
"Breached"
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.
Yeah, the term "breached" was a very poor choice, because it sounds like "this was breached recently" instead of telling "the database could be seen by anyone ever since the app's conception, and it only came to light today" which has much worse implications.
This app's data store was "breached" in the same way that one breaches a castle by walking across the lowered drawbridge, through the open gate, past the empty guard stations.
My general observation thus far has been that submissions from 404media are rarely anything that I'd consider quality content for HN.
I wouldn't go that far. What they uncover with their FOIA requests that the general public would otherwise never know about tends to be quality content. And, like the Wired, their FOIA-based articles aren't paywalled.
No one "breached" the site. The pictures sat on a public-facing Firebase bucket, ripe for the taking.
How is this user data even reliable or useful when someone can make fake personas and populate their activity with LLMs?
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.
I hope it served as a good lesson to the average person to be more cautious while submitting sensitive information like a government ID. Just because it's an app with a nice UI doesn't mean it's secure, let alone trustworthy regarding who owns it. Last week I was contacting a government agency here in Canada and the support team requested a government ID to be shared over email, which is anything but a secure communication. I tried to share it as a link to my vault, but they refused, so now either I will have to go in person or they will find another way in the meantime.
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!
CEOs and board members should be personally criminally liable for shared personal information coming out of their platforms.
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
To be fair to the FinTech companies and their leadership, banking and finance laws are so draconian to the point where you'd rather store (and risk leaking) sensitive data than face even bigger fines from the government overlords. If you want that to stop, get rid of the PATRIOT Act and reform the KYC insanity.
> I hope it served as a good lesson to the average person to be more cautious while submitting sensitive information like a government ID.
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.
The sad part is that your government ID is about as likely to be leaked by the government agency itself than it is by any third party that has an scan of it.
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.
You need to do this for background checks for employment, even though the employees for the background check service might be outsourced to a different country, and your government data had no protections in their jurisdiction.
I absolutely realize that this is a function of privilege but I've declined to participate in these sorts of background checks and have still been hired on a few occasions.
I always do. I would have never made social media accounts if it required phone or ID. Thankfully I'm old so my accounts were made before normies flooded the net and started trusting everything.
> Thankfully I'm old so my accounts were made before normies flooded the net and started trusting everything.
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.
Every hotel and his dog takes a copy of my passport, it’s basically public domain.
> 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!
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.
It was definitely a mistake. The internet was not meant to be taken seriously. Measures like real name policies are designed to make people take it seriously but that is to the detriment of the users who do.
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.
When I started on the internet it was common to use real name, and indeed include things like addresses and phone numbers in usenet .sigs
On the rare occasion when I have to do this, I blur the maximum amount of the image and watermark it with hundreds of lines of small red font saying “FOR EMPLOYMENT VERIFICATION BY $X_ENTITY.”
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.
>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).
You can use OBS to overlay your watermark on your webcam feed, then expose the composited output as a virtual camera that you select in the browser.
This is a really useful practice, going to implement it as well.
You have a choice of not using such apps.
Apps like the visa application to Australia? Yes I suppose I could not use them.
At the cost of being excluded from a larger and larger part of everyday social life.
You can send it as an encrypted PDF, fwiw
If my license gets leaked and then a stalker shows up at my house, I will simply turn them away on the grounds that it was illogical to assume the license wasnt faked.
> Drivers licenses can be faked. Moreover, someone can just pretend to be someone else on this app with real drivers licenses.
These are actually still very hard to do. I don't know anyone who would let me use their license for this purpose.
Is there a way, to verify if potential partner uses this app? Or if they are in "are we dating the same guy" type of group?
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.
There is now.
Would you want your own app usage available to other people? I’m going to guess not. This is a gross request, not surprised you’re using a throwaway account, as you seem to know this is a shameful thing to ask for.
And whatever happens on that app is not gross? If a revenge porn or csam site is busted, won't people want to know who were on it so that they can stay away from the potential predators? Isn't that why sex offenders' lists exist? Honestly, this app should be treated no less. The fact that they were able to remain on App and Play stores in the name of 'women's safety' demonstrate how grossly sexist, populist and vindictive the corporate structure in Apple, Google and the others have become. Binding one side to strict dogma and unwavering standards, while allowing the other side to anonymously wreak havoc on reputations is precisely the type of moral bankruptcy that's being challenged and assailed here.
Easy post negative information about yourself on there.
You need to verify you're a woman with some form of ID before you can get into the app. Faking an ID and a picture can't be that difficult in the age of AI (especially not when the company that's supposed to verify you is this callous with their users' PII), but it's not as quick and easy as you suggest.
Ask her?
Do you expect abusive people to answer honestly? The perceived anonymity on the app is a double edged sword.
With all the state/countries starting to do ID verification, this is a good lesson in what can go horribly wrong with these types of policies.
This x100.
"Safety" is doing a lot in this headline. It's a gossip app.
Here are some statistics for you to consider:
* Out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, approximately 310 are reported to the police.
* Of those reported, only about 13 cases are referred to a prosecutor.
* Ultimately, only about 7 cases lead to a felony conviction.
* For every 100 rapes reported, only 18 result in an arrest.
* Fewer than 7% of reported rape cases lead to a conviction.
* In some studies, the conviction rate for rape has been reported as low as 3.2% in certain jurisdictions.
Sources:
https://rainn.org/articles/what-expect-criminal-justice-syst...
https://www.uml.edu/news/stories/2019/sexual_assault_researc...
If you could imagine what girls and women go through, some on a daily basis, for years, since childhood, I think you might have a better understanding of why a "gossip app" might actually be a pretty sensible option for avoiding sexual assault and worse.
And as a man, do you know what happens when you report sexual assault?
You get laughed at. Hard.
So yeah, I'd like to see these broken down between cis-, hetero-, homo-, and trans-.
And why are cis-lesbian-women also reporting higher numbers of sexual assault than man/woman relationship? No men in that relationship.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5511765/
The rainn articles are propaganda with a specific slant.
> And why are cis-lesbian-women also reporting higher numbers of sexual assault than man/woman relationship? No men in that relationship.
I think you've misread that paper. The sexual assault survey wasn't limited to sexual assaults within a relationship or limited to one's sexual orientation.
Lesbians can be sexually assaulted by men.
Outsourcing job was it? Modern programmers are literally terrible at all basic stuff (who stores ID images in the db and then in the clear, do you have many other mental issues or what?) (I see startups like Resend making the same mistakes and still people use them, so there isn't much punishment even from people with half a brain) and AI is going to make it all so much worse. And a public bucket. I think it should be criminally liable to be that sloppy.
I don't think it's a modern programmers problem, in fact, I think we can argue we are much better than 20 years ago at least in terms of security.
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.
But that was because no one told them. Now they are told and taught. A lot of systems Warn even for opening something publicly... And yet.
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).
> But that was because no one told them. Now they are told and taught.
That's precisely my point.
> Most (by far) CVE's are not 'honest mistakes' or missed corner cases because rocket-science; they are just sloppy programming.
This is actually true, but it's true because we have way better tooling and safer languages, which means we don't see nearly as many buffer overflows or memory management issues.
It's not that you didn't have negligent programmers back then.
> 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).
That's not new though. We've seen similar things happen in the past multiple times.
20 years ago code review was literally a bunch of meetings in a room or talk with another developer in person. Having something like github where you make a pull request, passes the automated test suite and requires a code review, etc. simply wasn't done. If in 2005 that already existed it was extremely bleeding edge.
I do have concerns about the code quality issues introduced by the abuse of LLMs, but until right before that was a thing, definitely the code quality in general has improved a lot.
I'm a firm believer that if you want to start a tech company, at least one of the founders has to have a technical background. Even if you outsource all the work, you need to be able to ask the right questions related to security.
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.
But now we have amazing vibe coding tools that mean that you don’t need to be technical or whatever - you can just deliver results. After all, the best LinkedIn influencers and founders don’t care about how something is delivered, just what.
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.
a few more of these incidents and they'll care a lot more
thats a joke right?
Tech background isn’t sufficient. They need to have security background. Some of the worst people I’ve met with respect to security have been technical enough to have the wrong level of confidence.
Doctors need to study 5 to 8 years and pass rigorous exams Attorneys the same Structural architects and engineers the same
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
Tech is special! Think about the margins, the gains, the $$$!
I bet on greed. It always wins.
By then we'll just launder the blame onto the AIs
Isnt there like millions of misconfigured firebase dbs in the wild with no auth, some including fortune 500 companies?
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/misconfigured...
Sad that a common response to "we might not want this app to exist" is "well, if you weren't cheating, you wouldn't have a problem with it".
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.
I think for many people see <cause> and any criticism of something that claims to be relate to that cause is seen as criticism of the cause and that's a full stop when it comes to thinking much further.
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...
I agree that you could make a Tea app for every faction's favorite cause, and use "safety" as the justification: report your local communist, report your local infidel, report your local secret white supremacist, report your local secret Western imperialism agent, report your local suspected jihadi, report a homosexual, report a suspected illegal immigrant, report a local adulterer, report an apostate, report a kulak.. etc. chefkiss
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.
I think this is also called 'politician's logic': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y
It's a useful app, as it helps men avoid the type of women who'd use such an app.
How would you even identify who is on the app?
The app conveniently offers its users' driver's licenses to the public.
It's so sad that legally you can't even say this was an intrusion. All data was already public. Probably vibe coded by the ceo who has no technical competence in whatever he vibe coded.
The leak contains drivers' licenses, but also location information. Someone on 4chan made a map of all the coordinates they could find and posted a public link.
So much for the "anonymous" app.
I mean, if you were put on the app by an ex, how would you ever find out?
I feel like that is part of the problem with it. Not only can somebody post about you make things up about you. You also may never know. And it could end up silently impacting you. Say you apply for a job and a female HR person checking your job application decides to use this app to do a "background check" on some of the males applying. If she sees someone on their saying you sexually assaulted someone, she probably isn't going to choose to interview or hire you. And she probably won't even tell you why. And the claim against you could be totally bogus.
This is the scary reality of an app like this, especially if it continued to go more mainstream.
Blaming women for wanting to seek out safety in this way is strange.
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.
Tell us more about the lofty social circles that have no psychopaths.
What's the bar they cannot clear?
Many women don't go to bars, as one example.
And you perhaps watch too much Netflix. Most friend groups do not include a psychopath. And if you date solely based on the recommendations of those friend groups, you can avoid 99% of bad things.
> And you perhaps watch too much Netflix.
Doubtful, I'm not big on such things.
I have, however, scoured decades of court documents and police records (the joys of freelance IT work) and stand by the observation that the absolute worst people can be found everywhere .. including unseen within the most milquetoast seeming circles until that day when acquaintances voxpop "they seemed like such a nice person" statements.
That's drawn from real life, not Netflix.
Sex pests can easily be professors, judges, police, priests, child physiologists, good Christians, devout Muslims, upstanding Jews, you name it.
The type not into nonconsensual sex?
How fast would an app for men, to identify false accusers, liars, afterwards regret, baby-trapping attempt, sabotaging contraceptives, and other false claims, get shut down for 'evilness towards poor innocent women'?
Just as Parieto indicates that the bulk of male sexual assaults are done by a few, also indicates that the bulk of female assaults and claims of sexual assault are also done by a few.
Apps like Tea only paint all men as abusive thugs. If this were done, say to black people, this app would have been shut down and a lawsuit in federal court filed. But men are OK to harass, libel, and demean.
Good on anonymous for exposing this obvious double standard. And I hope they get sued by everyone.
Because our entire civilization is built on recipricoal alturism, which requires reputation so that in the event someone defects it carries negative consequences to discourage defection.
We're in agreement. Is an anonymous takedown app the solution for reputation management that enables civilization? If someone is trying to destroy your reputation, on which your entire livelihood depends, should you at least know who the accuser is, how reputable they are, what evidence they have? Do you want to give the Internet a magical button to destroy you on a whim?
I actually agree with you that this sort of thing can have bad outcomes and thus comes with significant risk for abuse. Part of the reason reputational systems work in real life is that the people bad mouthing other people also face reputational consequences if they do so unfairly (over a long enough time period where it becomes obvious), which is something missing from this type of app.
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.
And these apps represent an attempt to privatize the state
To be fair none of this would be possible without the state-created identity infrastructure.
I mostly agree, but it's different for women due to how frequently they are subject to violence and how comparatively defenseless they are compared to the average man. Many women (and men) would gladly give up some privacy in exchange for (perceived) safety. And any man who doesn't understand that is either lying or has never known a woman.
It's fair that men and women have different challenges here. But humans are squishy and chaotic and self-interested, they're not angels of pure wisdom, fairness and justice. Giving someone a repercussion-free button to destroy someone else the instant they feel slighted, vindictive, threatened, jealous, disrespected, is a recipe for disaster. There's a reason these apps have not once worked sustainably, they always turn into a vile cesspool that brings the worst out of mobs.
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.
Related ongoing thread; others?
Women are anonymously spilling tea about men in their cities on viral app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682914 - July 2025 (17 comments)
So it wasn't "breached" ... It was just so badly made that the bucket was public. Vibe coding ?
Lots of us were bad at this even before AI.
Seriously, if you looked at the comments in this thread, you'd think this is the first data breach of its kind.
for someone who thought Tea was a good idea, what would be the objection be if this leaked contributor data were used to populate a similar app to warn men off?
There's no objection, but it doesn't work because men compete while women collude.
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.
> There's no objection, but it doesn't work because men compete while women collude.
It's funny because many people, even some women would say you have the genders flipped here
Anyone who says a woman can give birth multiple times a day is.... smoking crack.
A rather brilliant idea I must say.
obviously it would be malicious and unethical, but since that didn't seem to stop Tea users, I'd be interested in what their arguments against it would be.
How is an app that allows users to post unverified and doxxing information about random men allowed on the IOS app store?
Apple had no issue mass censoring Parlor and others, how is an app like this able to reach #1 under all?
Safety for favored people, doxxing for the disfavored.
Truth.
If big tech didn't have double standards they'd have no standards at all.
There's only one guiding principle for Apple - and that's money. Dont let their privacy marketing ("Privacy is a human right") fool you otherwise.
Why don't you try uploading an app where men doxx & "review" women that they date on dating apps? See if Apple suddenly finds morals.
One could say that about any company (because "fiduciary duty", amirite?).
"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?
But when a company makes moral arguments ("We're better than others because of X") the bar goes up.
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.
Apple fired its Chief Diversity Officer when she said that white men with blue eyes can also count towards a diverse workforce. A purely non-monetary ideological capitulation.
https://www.bet.com/article/pe65fc/apple-s-black-diversity-c...
What was wrong about what she said?
I think it was a perfectly reasonable statement. But because it does not align with a recent radical redefinition of diversity, she was fired. Apple certainly wasn’t at risk of losing money over keeping her in that role.
A flash in the pan gossip app that when it functions normally is not worried about anyone's privacy / accuracy ... also doesn't care about good policies or their user's privacy.
That seems about right.
You could say that the *Tea has been spilt*
Painting this as a "gossip" app seems extraordinarily reductive. Women have a good incentive to share info about and to one another for safety beyond "gossip."
If guys had an app that women couldn't access where we shit talked all of our exes with photo evidence women would riot at the company HQ.
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.
Is it reductive? It also has good incentive for someone jilted or misinterpreting something to suddenly tarnish someone's reputation with little recourse for the other party. It is a one-sided review app for people in a way that people affected may never even know!
Go checkout the website, the first image is just two people gossiping.
This app operates just like an app some creep online would use, people post pictures (permission or not) and gossip about them.
There’s also a ton of bad incentives for those women who lie, manipulate and abuse beyond “gossip”.
Yeah? What are they?
Attention. Revenge. Blackmail. Victimhood personality types.
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.
In 2008 when the GFC every company we worked IT for on contract fired their IT staff first. Two weeks later, we had bonanza period right through into the next year. They realised the hard way that those lowly cheap IT staff were quietly keeping them afloat. We charged a lot to fix their problems they created because their CEO thought IT was a waste of money.
This will prove security in IT coding is necessary, so enjoy watching the drama unfold.
IT security bonanza time. It wont be long.
Oh no, they doxxed the users of the doxxing app. Shocking (tiny violin emoji)!
it should have never been allowed to be published anyway. not trying to justify what is happening, but these kind of apps are historically abused and create more problems than they intentionally try to solve.
On X, one of the leaked pictures seemed to be a DoD ID card, and I wondered why Tea needed proof of someone's identity. Then I remembered Uber and Lime both want your drivers license. Facebook and Instagram supposedly request it too if your account gets locked. This is not a new normal I like.
They posted an official response:
https://www.teaforwomen.com/data-breach
> At 6:44 AM PST on 7/25, we identified unauthorized access to our systems and immediately launched a full investigation to understand the scope and impact of the incident. Here’s what we know at this tim
The first sentence is already a lie as there was never authorization in place followed by more lies.
Not to be overly pedantic but authorization and security are two different things. If I leave my front door unlocked and open, that doesn't mean Bob the Homeless Hobo is authorized to enter my house.
How should bob know? You left it open..
"Your data privacy is of the utmost importance to us."
No it ain't.
That page is nothing but lies. Wow. They admit to lying to their users(about data retention) and then lie more. That's incredible.
Someone dropped a map from all of the photos metadata
RIP
https://x.com/vxunderground/status/1948850061493850598
A case for ironclad data privacy laws that allow people to pierce the veil and request deletion.
This reminds me of people saying "a honest person has nothing to hide". A honest woman who has nothing to hide, would post stories under her name and write her address, GPS coordinates and phone number in case someone needs clarifications or has objections to the post.
You can get Apple Legal involved if your face is on the app and they should get the related posts removed.
It's on a torrent. Good luck getting that removed.
I think they mean the actual posts on tea itself, not the leaked ID photos.
Even if only a few women are abusive and gossiping, they will doxx a lot of innocent men. At that stage, that entire app should be treated as illegal and shut down, instead of hoping that Apple legal will find the time to settle each complaint. The entire app is a toxically bigoted concept that gets a pass because the term 'women's safety' is attached to it.
I'm failing to see how this app is legal. States like Arizona have recently passed anti doxxing laws. Posting any information on this app with the intent of social pressure, harassment, etc is illegal in those states.
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.
> I can see the argument on both sides but ...
I recently saw a screenshot from one of these apps (so I can't guarantee its authenticity. But it's not an inconceivable scenario). Someone posted a man in there with his photo. The elephant in the room is that the man is dead! His ex-wife (with whom he had children) is enraged by this and is demanding to have it removed. Instead of addressing her concern, one of them decides to report her!
Now this may be an anecdotal argument. But when it pertains individual rights and human dignity, even a single violation is sufficient to question the ethics and legality of such endeavors. An important fact here is that nobody has absolute rights. Any rights are valid only as long as they don't infringe on someone else's rights. So, smearing, maligning and vilifying someone cannot be justified in the name of 'women's safety'.
This is one of those cases where you can't find a balance between both sides. One side is objectively wrong. Ruining the lives of any number of innocent men must not be an acceptable compromise for ensuring women's safety. There must be ways to achieve that without causing such widespread collateral damage. Their argument to the contrary is not just lazy, it reeks of hubris and contempt.
I don't usually care about downvotes, but it's alarming when those votes are in support of a bigoted stance like in this instance. I don't support doxxing, defamation or bullying of any innocent person, including women. But why is this utterly detestable act being justified and upheld when the victims are men? Would the response be the same if the genders in that message were swapped? This is just a single example of how unabashedly sexist the HN crowd in general (and the corporate world in general) has become. I hope that the individuals who strike at the opposition to such toxic behavior are very proud of their irrationally lopsided sense of justice and their contributions to a very fractured and bitter society.
It's almost poetic that this happens on the same day UK demands website to collect personal identification. I'm looking forward to the shitshow in the upcoming months.
Gentlemen, we're working on a new app called Eyeroll. It's a revolutionary new dating app, where our users can rate the women they have dated based on favorable and/or unfavorable attributes. Every month, our marketing team will generate a scoreboard of profiles that score highest on all mainstream attributes, and our search and filter function will rival that of Amazon (including the much requested sort by lowest first.) We're seeking $23-to-$23.5 million in funding to get our product over the finish line.
- 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 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.
> 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.
Yeah, I wouldn't worry about the allegedly part, 4chan is dissecting that torrent as we speak, it's quite the party.
Let's be real you wrote men/women only to be PC. You really meant small group of men.
>> Let's be real you wrote men/women only to be PC. You really meant small group of men.
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.
No, it really does apply to both. Women who are not dating or are in a stable relationship won't use that app.
People with stable values and relationships most likely won't be on these apps. The wide acceptance of hookup culture via apps is not universal.
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.
>In some cultures, mentioning dating apps will immediately lead to negative assumptions
Hell, that's the case in my culture, and I'm a modern American. These dating apps seem to be a consequence of modern urban disfunction, and I can't imagine ever using one. Or admitting without shame that I did.
Now, that's my feeling, but I realize that others have different feelings, depending on which subcultures you're immersed in.
Not sure about what "some cultures" you're talking about, but AFAIK "dating apps" is the #1 answer (or at least in the top 3) to "how did you meet your partner" in many countries. They're not just for hookups. Many even market themselves as being for committed relationships, or have features to facilitate that (eg. filters).
Yes but for the women who are on the app, the distribution of dates is much less skewed. (I assume.)
Oh yeah, my whole point was the a selection bias.
LOL, well deserved. https://youtu.be/WjfpryoQ0Mk
Why the downvote? It is just pictures and names. Both disclosed against their will but, and this is the ROTFL part, this is exactly what the ladies did. Uploading pictures and names of unsuspecting male victims and violating their privacy.
Let ladies have some of their own medicine.
My guess, hired the absolute lowest paid developers and got what they paid for.
I’d like to start seeing legal jeopardy for companies that are careless with customer information. Make developers scared to retain anything they don’t absolutely need.
Damn, this app is going down quicker than coalfax
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.
Just yesterday I saw tweets from someone popular in tech Twitter talking about how great it was that he helped the person who made this.
To be fair offering a platform for people to commit torts probably isn’t the best idea
if im understanding correctly this was a public bucket? aside from the obvious leaking of data couldnt this also be subject to a DoW (denial of wallet) attack where a user could auto download all the images constantly on a VPS and cause a massive bill?
according to the company this was an old bucket they used prior to 2024 when they moved to a more robust system.
So...they were storing people's information long term in a publically accessible bucket when users did not know. In fact, I believe users were told their IDs/selfies were immediately deleted(not stored), then Tea turned around and says they were legally required to store those photos. Tea had to address this in their press release, apparently.
"An app was created to help women stay safe on dates and avoid creeps, proceeds to be hacked by creeps"
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...
An app that was created to publicly share images and public information of people got the images and public information of the people sharing it exposed.
I don't know how can anyone feel wrong about this without feeling even worse for what was already taking place.
>However, Tea could have done a modicum of cybersecurity work (or hired an outside firm) to prevent this.
I have no doubt in my mind that this is what they did. An "outside firm" vibe coded this and delivered the results.
Dear reader, the women were the creeps.
I thought 4chan died a year or so ago?
Ugh. I’m clearly getting old. I don’t even remember the last time I went to 4chan.
It was knocked offline and a lot of journalists and bloggers spun a history about it not coming back. But it did.
It's unironically a stronger case for network effects than Facebook
All the mods were doxxed too, but life uh finds a way?
Thanks - this is context I was missing :)
that thing is a cockroach. It will survive every tech company you can care to name.
You can report it to Google Play. The category is Restricted Content -> User Generated Content, and the app ID is "com.tea.tea". https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/cont...
What's the actual violation though? If you click through the "User Generated Content" link, it shows that it's allowed, just that they have to moderate it.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
The actual violation would be a privacy violation
Just wanted to add…I can’t sneed
Isn't Apple supposed to protect these app users? I suspect a lawsuit is in the making.
There’s nothing Apple can really do about backend security of apps.
Conceivably these storage endpoints might’ve never been directly exposed to mobile clients, instead going through other proxies or CDNs.
I think what they meant is that Apple is allowing a legally dubious app to operate.
Not that apple should enforce minimum security, but that the app shouldn't be allowed on the App Store in the first place. For obvious reasons.
Supposedly, if your photo is posted on Tea you can contact Apple. Then Apple will force Tea to take your information down.
But how would you know your photo or any slander is even on there? From what I heard, the app requires a photo and video based verification through a third party service to determine if you’re a woman (which itself seems problematic). Without that access you wouldn’t even know if your information is on there.
IMO, you don't need individual grievances to shut down that app. A lot of the content has already been leaked - some even by women who don't necessarily agree with the method. And there are a lot of complaints based on them. Many don't even need you to know the background of the men to know that they are toxic and unethical (and probably illegal as well). Cases like 'ghosting after a single date', 'not good in bed', something else equally frivolous or a lot of one-sided narratives. What do all these have to do with 'women's safety', as much as they have to do with men's safety? A lot of men are genuinely weary of dating precisely because of those (I'm talking about men who prefer relationships, not the MGTOW types). This is extremely harmful to the society in general. I believe that these platforms are misusing the 'women's safety' argument to exploit corporate bias in order to circumvent anti-doxxing safeguards and reinforce a very toxic culture.
Firebase again lol
Letting frontend bootcamp devs think they can do backend was a mistake .
Hahaha. Bet money they left everything accessible just by signing in into the app.
it's always firebase. always.
At this rate what is even the point of dating for men? An angry ex can just ruin your reputation.
I get this feeling that you will be downvoted to oblivion on HN if you talk against anything that harms men. Even when it involves technology and is therefore relevant here. Many seem to think that gender equality, justice, sexual violence, etc applies only to one gender. I really would like to know how we reached this situation and their justifications for it.
I think there is a stupid propensity to overcorrect in the mainstream media about polarizing issues for profit which has been normalized by repeated messaging and has spread into our normal lives like a disease.
Violence again women is very real and men have been the main inflictors of it. However violence against men isn't physical because just biology. So it takes more insidious forms which combined with expectations of masculinity makes it so much more worse.
If we chose to selectively condemn the former kind of visible violence without protesting the more hidden kind, it is equally toxic as condoning violence against women.
Proudly lauding an app that enables scaling up of this kind of toxicity without any recourse by giving women carte blanche is another form of extremism.
4chan is still a thing? I thought it was hacked to death.
i thought the CIA cut its funding
The trend has been for all things related to sex, dating and relationships to be aggressively male hostile. But I think it's certainly peaked. Off topic, any notice how anti -male bumble is? Trash app.
"Security breach" more likely a vibe coded slop app
But yeah please tell me how "we care about your privacy"
Unlikely considering it allegedly launched 2 years ago: https://www.distractify.com/p/what-is-the-tea-dating-app
I believe this argument, still not clear why it became viral recently
Tiktok. Some men who got flagged in the app shared their perspectives and some of it went viral.
> more likely a vibe coded slop app
I mean, it's fun to throw baseless accusations around, but do you have any actual reason to suspect this?
If you look at the API, it is a slop app. The IDs were being uploaded to a public Firebase bucket. Chats are also public now. The full API keys are leaked because they were in the shipped app.
None of that ever happened before AI. Right...
It had to learn from somewhere!
Do you think if that was disproved that would be better somehow?
What Tea Got Wrong (and how to avoid it) https://youtu.be/mMvfBUNNKIY
That "Tea" app seems like a real GDPR nightmare anyway.
Repeal section 230 and end this Black Mirror dystopian madness.
This is legit funny
Given it's now "fixed", here's the scraping code so you can verify how this went down:
https://pastebin.com/CPBiqd1E
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20250725124140/https://pastebin....
Bro, I’m just vibing. Wym I have to care about data security… shakingmyheadsmh
I would not be disappointed if some actual hacking was done to bring down the entire app. I don't think the Tea app realizes just how many competent people dislike them, and they clearly have very few competent people of their own.
hahahhahaha
LMAOOOO deserved
4chan thread with details of the hack - https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/511317913
They have geo-mapped all the users - https://imgur.com/bRAJ2nU
Some of the users photo's are AI, which is interesting.
They got all the chat logs - https://x.com/NEElimit/status/1948766332503130562
60 Gig torrent said to be out with all the data - https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1948787086493901097 data structure - https://files.catbox.moe/c6ej81.json
For those who wish for the old days - "Vibe Coding" - shonky websites with shonky security, doxxing on all sides, 4chan pops back into relevance. You get your early internet redo.
HN 'Tea' thread discussing the ethics of the doxxing app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682914
With all this talk about age verification, I have to wonder if the complete lack of security was intentional.
How do you mean?
The UK and some US states are instituting age verification for adult content. Doxxing thousands of women is a great way to get people talking about privacy and security.
That feels like a hell of a risk to take just to get a conversation started. Not just the obvious implications of endangering all the users, but the cloud that's going to hang over everyone associated with Tea, now.
https://www.teaforwomen.com/about
Two people, in public.
For all the gloating in here about doxxers getting doxxed, there sure are a lot of HN accounts exposing themselves as utter creeps in here.
What a moment to be a woman dude...
Not to get all conspiratorial, but if I was an incel, or other type of woman-hating-man, with an axe to grind, creating an app to "protect" women and their dirty secrets, then having their data "breached" would be a pretty diabolical revenge plan. Only women can join the app, but the only person running the app is a man? Nothing suspicious about that...
This is such excruciating incompetence by the app developers I'm wondering if it was intentional. Done to punish the women who dared to speak up about vile men.
I just hope they can pursue legal action for this, whether it was a deliberate trap or not.
Kind of meta toxic behaviour to download the data from a App that has the goal to prevent woman from men toxic behaviour.
Doxxers getting doxxed is peak irony.
Let’s not kid ourselves, the goal is to shame men in an attempt to control them.
Maybe if all these creepy men just dated each other and left women alone, the problem would solve itself.
Great suggestion, very practical and well intentioned. On that note, I had another idea; toxic women should stop associating with men. They should take themselves off the dating apps and stop ruining the lives of any men that might be unfortunate enough to pair up with them. My suggestion is just as practical as your suggestion I think. The toxic women can self-identify and voluntarily exclude themselves just as well as the creepy men.
>They should take themselves off the dating apps
Then they can't complain about how horrible people are. Unfortunately, being a victim is a large part of many people's personalities. This is especially true for the "chronically single" people on dating apps. It's never their fault people don't want to date them! It's everyone else who is horrible.
Years ago when I was on the apps and went on dates it was obvious who these people were. They rarely actually go on dates because every person they match with is a predator to them. Then, if an actual date happened, it would quickly go nowhere because they're treating you as if you're a predator. The whole vibe with these people is awkward and judgmental. Then folks wonder why their dating app experience is bad.
I don't think that's the actual goal, or outcome.
Some observations:
- 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.
> The fact that this app exists solidifies that a small group of men/women do most of the dating on the quick fleeting connections on tinder etc while the vast majority on a few if not none at all.
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.
>Isn't that true in the real world as well?
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.
anyone talking about "markets" in dating is a redpiller. That's redpill talk. They probably also "neg" women and talk about eugenics-adjacent stuff.
People have been using "off the market" since before the internet was born.
It’s true in the real world, but dating apps make it much more exaggerated.
I think making prostitution illegal was probably a mistake. This used to be confined to brothels and everyone shamed it.