“I ain’t never need a reality show after this app,” – My Experience on The “Tea” App: From Good Intentions to Data Leaks & Messy Drama

The current dating landscape is complicated. With the infiltration of the online self-proclaimed “relationship gurus,” social media couples (think of the couple channels), the completion of a drama-filled season of the reality television series Love Island USA, debates on the differences between a talking stage, relationship, and situationship, those seeking intimate relationships by simply trying to put themselves out there are challenged by these obstacles.

Now, imagine being a woman. It’s more than just obstacles and challenges, or knowing and interpreting red flags from green flags; it’s dangerous. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women in the United States experienced completed or attempted rape during their lifetime. You never know who you are going on a date with, and anything could happen. The tragic stories of women who got hurt or murdered while on a date, for example, the death of Lauren Smith-Fields, who was found unresponsive by her Bumble date, Matthew LaFountain. The dating world makes it significantly harder for women to navigate, and safety is the top priority.

This is where Sean Cook comes into the picture. After witnessing his mother being catfished and unknowingly interacting with men who have criminal records through online dating, Cook made it his mission to create the first-ever dating safety platform for women. He created and self-funded the Tea Dating Advice app (also known as “Tea” or the “Tea (app)”) in 2023. Tea gained online traction due to the conversations and video discussions about gender dynamics in dating on social media. With more than 2.5 million requests to join the app, Tea landed at the top of the app downloads charts, with many users being placed on a waitlist.

However, Tea has been in controversy. Outside of critics claiming that Tea invades and wrongfully exposes the privacy of men, on July 25th, the app was at the center of a data breach, where their legacy data storage system was compromised, leading to unauthorized access to a dataset from before February 2024.

According to an official statement made by Tea, the dataset consisted of approximately 72,000 images, including “approximately 13,000 selfies and photo identification submitted by users during account verification and approximately 59,000 images publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments, and direct messages.”

The data from the hack, including photos of women and identification cards containing personal details, were circulated online. According to 404 Media, an anonymous user shared the database of photographs on 4chan, and other users shared a map that used data from the leak to tie the images to locations. The thread has since been deleted.

Tea clarified that only users who signed up before February 2024 were affected, and they’re working with cybersecurity experts and the FBI in an active investigation. Since the data breach, Tea has fixed the data issue, implemented additional security measures, and removed the direct messaging function of the app. They are working to “identify any users whose personal information was involved and will be offering free identity protection services to those individuals.”

When the data breach first happened, many people were perplexed as to why Tea required photo IDs in the sign-up process. I signed up to join the Tea app on July 23rd, two days before the data breach, and I was not asked to provide a photo ID. Instead, Tea asked me to take a selfie to ensure that I am a woman, a major requirement when you sign up for a Tea account.

In the FAQs section of their official statement, Tea stated that in their early stages of development, they “required selfies and IDs as an added layer of safety to ensure that only women were signing up for the app.” In 2023, Tea removed the ID requirement.

The first time I heard of the Tea app was on TikTok, and the way people were describing how the app was being used, it seemed to me that anonymous women were on Tea to air out dirty laundry about men (e.g., being broke, scammers, their intimate preferences, etc.). However, when I saw a TikTok video on my For You Page on the morning of Wednesday, July 23rd, of a girl scrolling on Tea, and her location was set in my home state of New Jersey.

I clicked on the comment section. There were hundreds of comments varying from “Omg I know that isn’t [so and so],” to “Not my fine s— being on the tea app :(,” and users tagging their friends, which I took as them letting their friends know that whoever they’re dating or hooking up with is on Tea, and probably not for good reasons. That inspired me to write this investigative article, risking my rough morning/fresh off the wake-up selfie and data (as previously stated, I requested to join Tea on July 23rd, two days before the data breach occurred on July 25th), to join Tea to see what’s happening and to report to you all, the general public, my observations.

Due to the data breach, my request to join Tea was delayed, and I was waitlisted for a good while. As I started to get concerned, I went on the Tea app and their social media accounts daily for updates. Fast-forward 12 days, and on the night of Monday, August 4th, Tea notified me that my request to join was approved.

My partner knew ahead of time that I would be on the Tea app to write this article and report on my observations, which he thought was a great story idea, and told me to be careful. I assured him that I will be on my P’s and Q’s. Then, I clicked on the notification.

The Tea app opens, and the first thing that pops up on my screen is the seven rules of the app:

I chuckled at rules five and six, because given what I saw on the Tea app before signing up, many, many users broke those two rules. I clicked off the button that said “I agree to these rules,” and then I was officially on Tea.

There it was, the main feed, containing numerous posts of men.

I started scrolling, seeing if I knew anyone while also reading through the various posts of random men. Reading the horrible experiences that the anonymous women have faced, from verbal to physical abuse, to manipulative and narcissistic behavior alike, to even men having the audacity, was mind-blowing. After filtering out the posts based on my location, I saw someone I used to follow on Instagram posted on Tea. The anonymous user described him as an alcoholic, a liar, and a cheater, as he frequently went on dating apps behind her back, and provided multiple screenshots.

In the days after I was accepted into Tea, I started filtering out different locations in the New Jersey area, even ones my partner suggested. He did see people he knew from high school on there. In the locations my partner suggested, I saw a man whom my older sister went to middle and high school with. I knew this man through his younger brother, as we attended middle and high school together and graduated in the same class.

The anonymous user who posted him detailed how he is an expert at manipulation, lying, cheating, narcissism, and being misogynistic. The anonymous user said they experienced physical and verbal abuse as well. His post had 50 red flags and 36 comments, with other anonymous users sharing similar sentiments.

In another post, the anonymous user went on a date with a man, and he cooked her dinner, and then started to touch her inappropriately. She ended up leaving; he was apologizing, but she didn’t forgive him. The post has three green flags and 36 red flags, with 36 comments. When reading the comments, I found out that this man has had a girlfriend for three to four years, yet presents himself as single on social media and in DMs. The girlfriend would always post him on Instagram and TikTok.

That girlfriend may know about his infidelity, because when I looked through her social media accounts, the majority of the content that he’s in is gone.

Meanwhile, some posts I saw on Tea made me laugh. For example, an anonymous user posted a man who invited her over, telling her that he would rent out the movie theatre in his apartment complex and get dinner. However, there was no movie or dinner. Instead, they watched movies in his bed. The man told the woman that he’s single, but in his bathroom, the woman saw a curling wand, a purse, and feminine hygiene products.

She ended the post by asking, “Why would he need a curling wand if he’s bald?”

I couldn’t stop laughing, and neither could the comments section, with one user commenting, “…I ain’t never need a reality show after this app.”

Physically, the Tea app has five icons at the bottom of the main feed. The first icon, a cup of tea, is the main feed/home page. This is where the plethora of posts by anonymous users is. You can filter them out based by name, location, age range, miles, oldest to newest, and if the post has green flags or red flags. The second icon, two message boxes, is a forum feed, where anonymous users can post asking for advice and polls.

The third icon, a “+” sign, is where the magic happens. When you click on it, the question, “What do you want to post?” comes up and there are five options you can choose from: man, advice, meme, poll or audio.

A fourth icon, a woman dressed as a detective with a hat and magnifying glass, is a section where you can do a phone number lookup, look at the sex offender map, do a reverse image search, a background check, a criminal record search, and a court search resources.

The fifth and last icon is a sidebar menu. It has tabs to access parts of your profile such as your account, posts, saved posts, alerts, and safety resources. The safety resources includes the national domestic violence hotline, national sexual assault hotline, crisis text line, national sexual violence resource center, crime victim resource center, womenslaw.org – legal advice for abuse, national human trafficking hotline, national suicide prevention hotline, the Noonlight app, court search resources (once again), and a safety product discounts section that is coming soon.

In the sidebar menu, you can also upgrade your account to get full access. Their perks include unlimited post searches (in the basic version, you only get 5 free searches for the month), background checks, criminal record search, sex offender search, reverse image search, find social media profiles, phone number lookup, set alerts for men’s names, access nationwide posts, boost your posts, filter posts by location, and no screenshots.

The upgrade is $19.99 a month, with 10% percent of the profits being donated to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

If you noticed in the photos I provided above, there is a message icon in the top right corner. That is where the now-defunct direct messaging (DM) system once was. When I click on it, it only loads.

My overall thoughts on Tea are that it is an extremely helpful tool to use to check the men in your area, whether you are about to hook up with one, go on a date, or maybe even take the next step into an official relationship. I appreciate how they have an ample amount of resources, from criminal search to domestic violence and human trafficking hotlines and websites, for women to go to.

It is unfortunate that Tea, an app designed for women to seek advice, help, and support, was bombarded with data leaks, messy drama, and male-dominated critics, to the point where there is another app to combat Tea, called TeaOnHer Dating Advice, for men.

Whether it is made with pure intentions or not, who knows? For men, they would have to find that out themselves.