Tea, a girls’s security courting app that surged to the highest of the free iOS App Retailer listings this week, has been the topic of a significant safety breach. The corporate confirmed Friday that it has “recognized licensed entry to considered one of our techniques” that uncovered 1000’s of consumer photographs.
In line with Tea’s preliminary findings, the breach allowed entry to roughly 72,000 photographs, damaged down into two teams: 13,000 photographs of selfies and picture 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 information system” that contained data from greater than two years in the past, the corporate mentioned in assertion. “At the moment, there isn’t any proof to recommend that present or further consumer information 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 photos of individuals’s faces are within the leaked information.
The premise of Tea is to supply girls with an area to report detrimental interactions they’ve had whereas encountering males within the courting pool, purportedly to maintain different girls secure. 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 develop into true, it should additionally play into the broader ongoing debate round whether or not on-line identification and age verification pose an inherent safety threat to web customers.
Within the privateness part on its web site, Tea says: “Tea Courting Recommendation takes cheap safety measures to guard your Private Info to forestall loss, misuse, unauthorized entry, disclosure, alteration and destruction. Please bear in mind, nonetheless, that regardless of our efforts, no safety measures are impenetrable.”
Tea mentioned it has launched a full investigation to evaluate the scope and impression of the breach.
