The Tea app, a dating safety tool where women can anonymously review men they dated, recently became a source of unverified personal information on college campuses, including Pitt.<\/p>\n
As the app gained popularity around campus, some students questioned whether its stated mission of protecting women was overtaken by ethical concerns.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tea Dating Advice<\/a> was created by software engineer Sean Cook in November 2022 after witnessing his mother get catfished online. The app was founded on the principle<\/a> that \u201cwomen should never have to compromise their safety while dating.\u201d The app\u2019s primary feature allowed women to post photos of men and rate them with Yelp-style<\/a> reviews. On each post, users could award \u201cgreen flags\u201d for positive experiences or \u201cred flags\u201d for poor or violent behavior.\u00a0<\/p>\n To access the platform, users submitted selfies that the app\u2019s AI verification used to confirm they were women. Once approved, the app offered reverse image searches to authenticate a man\u2019s identity, phone number lookups to check for hidden information and background checks that searched public records and sex offender registries.<\/p>\n Courtney Colligan, a gender, sexuality and women\u2019s studies professor, identified \u201cred flags of a different kind\u201d within the Tea app. Colligan pointed to the app\u2019s disconnect from traditional safety networks like a \u201cwhisper network<\/a>,\u201d or an informal chain of contextualized information passed privately between women.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAlready, we\u2019re seeing a platform [in the Tea app] and the way that it\u2019s packaged that\u2019s trying to get more clicks and downloads rather than actual routes in safety,\u201d Colligan said. \u201cI think there\u2019s this issue with a lot of safety and advocacy initiatives getting co-opted into capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Ben Balla, a first-year student on a pre-pharmacy track, the Tea app circulated widely at Pitt for about two weeks this fall. Balla first heard about the app from his hockey team, where one player had \u201caround 30 red flags\u201d within days of the semester starting.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce it became a thing, I knew people who were consistently stalking their boyfriend\u2019s profiles,\u201d Balla said. \u201cEverybody I knew was talking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ella Aben, an undeclared first-year student, heard about the Tea app while at dinner with friends. While Aben agreed that there should be a platform that protects women from abuse, she noted that she had mostly seen users \u201ccriticizing appearances\u201d on the app.<\/p>\n \u201cI think my initial thought was, \u2018Wow, imagine if men had an app for girls like this,\u2019 and how bad our reaction would be to that,\u201d Aben said. \u201cIt\u2019s not being used the way it was intended to be used, and the way it is being used is dehumanizing and degrading.\u201d<\/p>\n In late July, Tea rose to the top of the Apple App Store\u2019s lifestyle category, securing over a million users<\/a> in just a week. Days later, a hack<\/a> exposed 131,000 images and users\u2019 personal data \u2014 but the Tea app wasn\u2019t removed from the App Store until late October due to not meeting user privacy standards.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n The Tea app\u2019s structure allowed reviewers to remain anonymous, while the men being reviewed theoretically couldn\u2019t access the app to see their reviews. Balla said users have to consider the comments with skepticism since there is no moderation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re basically able to hide behind a screen with no repercussions,\u201d Balla said. \u201cYou can twist the story any way you want, and because you\u2019re anonymous, no one can call you out if you\u2019re lying.\u201d<\/p>\n The comments on a post about Balla contained false information, and he had no way to respond or correct them.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI found out that somebody commented that I had a girlfriend,\u201d Balla said. \u201cI don\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n One of Collagin\u2019s main concerns about anonymous platforms like Tea is that false claims can still leave a mark, even after they\u2019ve been refuted.<\/p>\n \u201cWith this assumption of \u2018everyone is guilty until proven innocent,\u2019 the issue is that the damage has already been done,\u201d Collagin said. \u201cEven if people find out, \u2018Oh, that didn\u2019t actually happen,\u2019 their perception has already changed.\u201d<\/p>\n While students still need a community to discuss safety, Colligan emphasized that it\u2019s important to find a more \u201cdirect, personal and secure communication system,\u201d rather than relying on anonymous reviews.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even still, the desire to fill an \u201cinformation gap\u201d often drives people to seek out and share unverified claims, Collagin said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have this awareness of \u2018I can find anything I want about anyone online.\u2019 Then, if you can\u2019t find something, you\u2019re immediately suspicious,\u201d Collagin said. \u201cI think that, honestly, entitlement to people\u2019s private lives is what we\u2019re kind of seeing play out. Is that our information to know?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Tea app, a dating safety tool where women can anonymously review men they dated, recently became a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5662,9362,21280,21281,73,75,74],"class_list":["post-34087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-app","tag-campus-life","tag-dating","tag-gsws","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}