Well, Tea App, the platform famously known as a women's dating and safety platform, has seen a massive data leak, through a pretty hilarious way involving a "subpar" storage mechanism.
Tea App Data Leak Involves More Than 10,000 Individuals Getting Their Verification Documents Surface Up Online
The 'Tea' App was initially intended to make dating easier for women who had signed up, and more importantly, the primary objective of it was to "spill tea" about men that they have dated, to identify potential red flags, or even narrate their experiences under an anonymous post. While the app did gain massive hype amongst internet users, it employed a somewhat surprising way of storing personal information. And that led to a vast data leakage, with information about women on the platform surfacing in a 4chan thread.
Interestingly, the data leak contains verification documents of many of those who signed up on the platform, and the more shocking part is the way 'Tea' developers stored the data. According to the user who revealed information on 4chan, the devs had apparently employed Google's Firebase for backend storage, and the buckets that contain chunks of data were set to public, which meant that there was no authentication when it came to accessing the contents of the storage. This allowed unauthorized data to surface over the internet, and it's all over X and Reddit now.
A report by CNET reveals that more than 72,000 images were exposed, including 13,000 verification documents and several images of women at the platform. People over the internet assume that the app's storage mechanism was "vibe-coded" but that's just pun-intended for now. However, not setting authentication with the Firebase storage was not a professional move at all, especially with all the sensitive data being taken by the 'Tea' app.
For our viewers, we do recommend double-checking the authenticity of the platform before submitting personal data, and for those who have their data leaked, we do feel pity.
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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