Tea Dating Advice App Scandal: From Viral Success to a Legal and Privacy Nightmare

Tea Dating Advice app was launched with a bold mission: to help women share experiences about men they’ve dated and avoid potentially harmful encounters. Marketed as the “Yelp for dating,” the app quickly gained viral attention. But just as fast as it rose to the top of the App Store, Tea has now plummeted into controversy after a massive data breach exposed thousands of users’ sensitive information.

Now, with two class action lawsuits and widespread backlash, the once-promising app is at the center of one of the most alarming privacy scandals in recent tech history.

What Is Tea Dating Advice?

Tea Dating Advice was launched in 2023 by Shawn Cook, who created the platform after watching his mother fall victim to multiple online dating scams. His goal was to give women a space to safely share their experiences and flag red-flag behavior from men they dated—without fear of retaliation.

Users could anonymously:

Post a man’s first name, age, and location Tag him with either a “red flag” (negative experience) or “green flag” (positive) Browse posts to “research” potential dates before meeting them

Unlike traditional dating apps, Tea wasn’t for finding love—it was for protecting women from potential harm.

Why the App Went Viral

In early 2025, Tea Dating Advice exploded in popularity, rapidly climbing to #1 on the App Store with over 4 million downloads. Social media, particularly TikTok, played a major role in its sudden rise. The app’s core idea—allowing women to protect each other from dangerous or deceptive men—resonated widely.

But behind the scenes, troubling issues were already brewing.

The First Red Flag: Data Collection and Verification

In its early days, Tea required users to go through a Know Your Customer (KYC) process:

Uploading a government-issued photo ID Taking a selfie for identity verification

The company promised these images would be deleted immediately and never stored on servers. However, this claim would later prove to be false—and catastrophic.

In July 2025, the Tea Dating Advice app suffered what the media initially reported as a “hack.” But cybersecurity experts and online sleuths quickly revealed the truth: there was no hack—just gross negligence.

A public cloud storage bucket containing:

13,000+ photo IDs and selfies 59,000+ user-uploaded images and posts was completely unprotected, accessible to anyone with a direct link.

A user on 4chan wrote a simple script to scrape all 72,000 files and leak them online.

This breach exposed:

Full names Faces Driver’s licenses and passport information Photos uploaded with posts

It was the worst-case scenario for an app designed to make women feel safer.

Tea’s parent company responded by downplaying the breach, claiming it only affected a “legacy database” from before February 2024, and that email addresses and phone numbers were not exposed.

But just three days later, a second breach was discovered—this time exposing over 1 million private direct messages between users.

Negligent data protection Breach of user trust Violations of consumer privacy rights, leaked data was used to create searchable maps of users based on driver’s license info, raising fears of stalking and identity theft.

The Tea app was built on the idea of protecting women from harm, but critics argue it enabled:

Anonymous defamation Doxxing of private individuals A lack of due process, where men had no ability to defend themselves