Would you believe that 4chan is involved?
Tea, an app that lets women “rate” and “review” the men in their lives, has been on a hot streak lately, having shot to the top of the App Store and enjoyed several recent write-ups in major media outlets. Unfortunately, the app has now disclosed a data breach involving self-submitted user images. One report cites claims that some of the data has been shared on 4chan, the incel-ridden internet backwater best known for helping to spawn the QAnon conspiracy theory.
404 Media first reported on the data breach, writing that users from 4chan “claim to have discovered an exposed [Tea] database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase.” The notorious site’s resident trolls bragged that they were parsing personal data and selfies from the app’s internal databases.
404 attempted to verify the claims made on the site. “While reporting this story, a URL the 4chan user posted included a voluminous list of specific attachments associated with the Tea app,” the outlet wrote. While the files were initially viewable, the page now gives an error and 404 says that it “verified that Tea does contain the same storage bucket URL that 4chan claims was related to the exposure.
