By Barbara Ortutay
Tea is an app designed to allow women to safely discuss men whose dates have been violated, with thousands of selfies and photo IDs being exposed, the company confirmed Friday.
According to Tea, around 72,000 images are leaked online. This includes 13,000 images of selfies or selfies that feature photo identifications submitted by users during account verification. Another 59,000 images from posts, comments and direct messages have also been published from posts, comments and direct messages, according to a Tea spokesperson.
According to the company, no email addresses or phone numbers are accessed, and violations only affect users who signed up before February 2024.
“Tea is a third-party cybersecurity expert and works round the clock to ensure that system,” the company said. “At this point, there is no evidence to suggest that additional user data has been affected. Tee users’ privacy and data protection is our number one priority.”
Tea presents as a safe way for women to direct veterinarian men anonymously to the veterinarian on dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble. We guarantee that your date is “safe, not catfish, not related.”
“Tea is a must-have app, and women should avoid the red flag before their first date with date advice and show the person behind the profile of the person they are on,” reads the Tea app store description.
404 Media, which previously reported the violation, said it was the 4Chan user who discovered an exposed database “whole can access the material” from the tea.
“While reporting this story, the URL of the 4Chan user posted contained a huge list of specific attachments associated with the TEA app. 404 Media saw the list of this file. In the last hour or so, the page was locked and returns a ‘permission denied’ error,” 404 Media reported on Friday.
In an Instagram post this week, Tea said it reached 4 million users.
Original issue: July 25th, 2025, 6:34pm EDT
