Tea, a girls’s security relationship app that surged to the highest of the free iOS App Retailer listings this week, has been the topic of a serious safety breach. The corporate confirmed Friday that it has “recognized licensed entry to one in every of our programs” that uncovered hundreds of consumer photographs.
Based on Tea’s preliminary findings, the breach allowed entry to roughly 72,000 photographs, damaged down into two teams: 13,000 photographs of selfies and photograph identification that individuals had submitted throughout account verification and 59,000 photographs that had been publicly viewable within the app from posts, feedback and direct messages.
These photographs had been in a “legacy knowledge system” that contained data from greater than two years in the past, the corporate stated in assertion. “Right now, there isn’t any proof to counsel that present or extra consumer knowledge was affected.”
Earlier Friday, posts on Reddit and 404 Media reported that Tea app customers’ faces and IDs had been posted on nameless on-line message board 4chan.
Tea requires customers to confirm their identities with selfies or IDs, which is why driver’s licenses and footage of individuals’s faces are within the leaked knowledge.
The premise of Tea is to supply girls with an area to report unfavorable interactions they’ve had whereas encountering males within the relationship pool, purportedly to maintain different girls protected. The app hit the No. 1 spot on Apple’s US App Retailer this week, drawing worldwide consideration and sparking a debate about whether or not the app violates males’s privateness. If the studies of a breach transform true, it’s going to additionally play into the broader ongoing debate round whether or not on-line identification and age verification pose an inherent safety danger to web customers.
Within the privateness part on its web site, Tea says: “Tea Relationship Recommendation takes affordable safety measures to guard your Private Data to forestall loss, misuse, unauthorized entry, disclosure, alteration and destruction. Please remember, nonetheless, that regardless of our efforts, no safety measures are impenetrable.”
Tea stated it has launched a full investigation to evaluate the scope and affect of the breach.
