The most downloaded free application on the Apple App Store is currently not Chatppt, Threads or Google. It is tea, an application of dating advice that allows women to review the men with whom they have come out, as well as to warn other single women of the dates who, according to them, were wrong.
Tea dating advice, an application to help women control their dates, is also a higher application on Google Play Store, where it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
The app manufacturer claims that it offers a safety measure for users Traditional dating applications don’t do it. Tea does not correspond to the singles with potential dates; It is rather a place for women to share information on the men with whom they have come out. TEA allows users to carry out records of the history of potential correspondence, check if they have a criminal record or appear on the databases of sex offenders, and even more, throughout the application.
The application also guarantees that users who register are women by asking them to submit a selfie for verification. This aims to protect users from the so-called cat fishing schemes, in which people create false online personalities, often as part of a plan of fraud of others.
Tea refused to comment on this article.
Number security
Certainly, most of the features that tea offer already exist. The forums on social networks, like the Facebook group called “Are we going out with the same guy?”, Also let women compare notes on their dates in a community forum. The main difference: scale. Tea has more than 1.6 million users, according to its website.
“What this application seems to do is centralize all of this into a very large community,” said Moneywatch Doug Zytko, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who is doing research on human-computer interactions.
Zytko, who has largely studied meeting applications, said that security “had not been prioritized” for most of the market tools, which, according to him, help explain why tea has touched the sensitive women’s rope.
“The safety characteristics of the dating applications that exist are largely reactive in nature. It is not to keep people in safety, but are punitive actions that can be taken after something has happened,” he added.
Zytko has also recognized the concerns of certain men, expressed on forums like Reddit, that users of two people could share false information about them.
“If inaccurate information on a man is shared, it damages his prospects for meetings and his social reputation,” said Zytko. “It’s frightening, but it’s not a reason to reduce the application.”
Another potential risk is common to all social media platforms and digital information more broadly. Tea confirmed to CBS News that its application was hacked on Friday morning, with bad players accessing a data storage system containing information, including selfies, which members had downloaded before February 2024.
In addition, the pirates have accessed nearly 60,000 images from messages, plus comments and direct messages, said the company.
“Tea has started third -party cybersecurity experts and works 24 hours a day to secure its systems,” said the company in a statement, noting that it is investigating the incident. “Currently, there is no evidence suggesting that additional user data has been affected.”
