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Many people use dating apps these days.
Bild: Alicia Windzio/dpa
Dating apps are part of everyday life for many people. To register, you often have to enter a lot of personal data. This is also the case with "Tea". Now it has been hacked. Thousands of details have been published.
Bumble, Hinge, Tinder, Lovoo, OkCupid, Pickable, Taimi, Lex - dating apps are a dime a dozen. They are an integral part of our society.
Online dating always raises the important question of safety: Are you actually meeting the person in the picture? Does this person possibly have a history of criminal offenses or is he or she violent? What possible "red flags" should you be aware of? The issue of safety is particularly important for women and queer people.
So "Tea" came up with a particularly innovative idea: to protect women, the men on the app can be rated by other women who have met him on a date. These ratings are then visible to all female users on his profile. Men have no access to the app - or to their profile.
"Tea" translates from English as tea. However, the word is also used for exchanging gossip.
The app was published in 2023. In 2025, it became a huge hype. It went viral on social media - mainly in the USA. Downloads and registrations skyrocketed.
Everything was going well until it wasn't.
To register as a woman on the app, you have to take a selfie and upload an ID document. Hackers have now captured this data - along with posts, comments and direct messages from countless women.
But how did this happen? After the app generated attention, some men felt they were being treated unfairly. The reason for this: If a woman writes an unjustified criticism, they can't defend themselves against it.
As a result of the hacker attack, thousands of data records - including 72,000 photos, 13,000 of which are verification selfies and ID information of the users, although according to the app, these should not actually be stored - were published and spread on the misogynistic platform "4chan", among others.
In the "4chan" forums, the women concerned are made a public target. An alleged map showing the addresses of the hacked users is spreading, reports theNew York Times. One user even recreated a website that allows users to browse through the stolen profiles and compare them in a kind of leaderboard.
A few days later, another breach became known, as "NBC" writes: A security researcher had managed to tap into a second database containing millions of direct messages from the service in which highly sensitive topics such as abortions were discussed.
According to the expert, there are indications that other unauthorized persons had also gained access to this database. "We found out that some personal messages were accessed as part of the first attack," explained Tea when asked by "NBC". The systems were therefore taken offline for security reasons. However, it is not yet clear whether data was also actively accessed via the second breach.
As Tea writes in a statement, all members who registered before February 2024 are affected.
The first affected parties have already filed a lawsuit, as reported bySternmagazine. The court documents state that one woman is holding Tea responsible "for the damage she has suffered and continues to suffer".
The class action lawsuit will also be open to "the thousands of other people affected by this massive and avoidable cyberattack" to join it. The app is not available in Switzerland.
