I can't open the article, but I think I read that this was hosted on an unprotected bucket. Assuming that's correct I wouldn't say this was a breach. A better headline would be "Women dating safety app 'Tea' exposed women's PII".

To be 100% clear, I'm not excusing the hackers. I don't believe it's morally correct to publicize something because it is exposed. For folks curious about that you can look into how to ethically disclose vulnerabilities. I still view this as doxxing. I still believe what the hackers did should be a criminal offense, it's just that I also believe the app holds a ton of the blame as well. How can you proclaim to be about keeping women safe while putting them at risk? That should be punished as well.

Like if the storage facility you trusted to hold your stuff never had locks on the doors, shouldn't they take a lot of the blame as well as the thief who found out a door was unlocked?

Reading these incredible comments has revealed a large piece of what was named as the reason for lemm.ee shutting down.

This is why there should be a nationwide rule that PII data should be deleted after the users identity has been verified

What are the chances of this being the main reason for the app's existence?

Hungry data privacy lawyers when they learned about Tea this week:

I don't quite understand the outrage in the thread. I've been looking through the comments, trying to see if this ever went beyond gossip and I can't find anything.

From my understanding the app was intended to be a safe space for women to discuss dating. Relaying information about dangerous individuals, or people who cheat. I can imagine that things might have gotten slightly out of hand in regards to anonymous gossip, but is that anything compared to being doxxed? Besides, women, and men have been gossiping behind each others backs for as long as humans have existed. An anonymous app makes it significantly worse certainly, but it is what it is. This behavior is always going to exist for better or for worse. For example, people already discuss this on sites like fetlife since the risk of ending up with someone who wants to batter you for the sake of battering you is somewhat high there.

Surely we can have some sympathy for people who have had their identifications doxxed by 4chan who haven't done anything worse than a bit of toxic gossip at most?

Tea is the offshoot of all those "Are We Dating The Same Guy" Facebook groups where ladies gossip, talk shit, slander and creep-shame guys they went on dates with, sometimes throwing around false accusations maliciously to get men ostracized.

On one hand, damn these groups are toxic as fuck and that makes me feel a lot less sympathetic. But on the other hand, this is a textbook argument for why mandatory age verification laws need to be abolished. AWDTSG works as a way to keep women safe when it's used as intended but there are too many women that will slander men with false allegations purely out of spite.

Another example of why people shouldn't be uploading/sharing nudes on any platform when the pretense is that it will only be between 2 people. That just isn't realistic anymore. Never was, really. I still don't get how people can hear and know about all the hacks happening now but they can't see that sending nudes is somehow unsafe? Why does society work this way?

One would have hoped the lesson here would be about the dangers of commoditfiying everything as a fucking "app", but no, it looks like its not the increadably irresponsible company at fault (as is tradition).