A phone app called Tea became the No. 1 app downloaded from the U. S. Apple App Store last week. Then Friday, news came that the app had been hacked, exposing thousands of images and other identifying information online. The users of Tea are women who want to exchange information about men they are considering as dates, or have dated and want to evaluate for other women. So any kind of data breach is disturbing, although it could have been worse.
Tea, an app introduced in 2023, is exclusively for women, and requires some form of identification to use. Once a user is logged in, she can either post information about a certain man, or research his background as reported by other users, similar to the popular Yelp app that uses crowdsourcing to rate businesses.
Understandably, some men take a dim view of Tea, and claim it violates their privacy or could even provide grounds for defamation lawsuits. An attorney named Aaron Minc has been getting "hundreds" of calls from men whose descriptions on Tea are less than complimentary. In an interview, Minc said Tea users could be sued for spreading false information. But as the Wikipedia site describing Tea points out, the truth is an absolute defense against such a charge. Nevertheless, being sued for any reason is not a picnic, and so with data breaches and lawsuits in the air, women may now think twice before signing up for Tea and posting the story of their latest disastrous date, which may have been arranged via social media anyway.
You might think most couples meet electronically these days, but a recent survey shows that even among those aged 18-29, only 23% of those who are either married or "in a relationship" met online. So meeting the old-fashioned eyeball-to-eyeball way is still how most couples get together. The woman meeting a new guy in person could still use Tea to check out the man's credentials, but that raises larger issues of how reliable the report of another woman would be, especially if the report is anonymous.
Lawsuits over relationships are nothing new, of course. One of the running plot threads that Charles Dickens milked for a lot of laughs in his first published novel, The Pickwick Papers, was how Mr. Pickwick's landlady Mrs. Bardell misunderstood a stray comment he made as a proposal of marriage, and filed a suit against him for breach of promise. Though the legal details differ, this kind of action pitted the woman against the man, who then had to prove that his intentions were honorable or lose the suit.
I will admit that the idea of anonymous women posting ratings on me is somewhat disquieting, but as a teacher at a university, I'm subject to somewhat the same treatment by "Rate the Prof" websites, which take anonymous reports by students of various professors and post them online. I never look at such sites, and if anything scurrilous has been posted about me, I've remained blissfully unaware of it.
The way Tea works raises the question of whether anonymity online should be as widespread as it is. That issue has been in the news lately as several states have passed laws requiring robust systems to verify ages for users of pornographic websites, for example. That is another example where anonymity leads to problems,and positive identification with regard to age can at least mitigate harms to children who are too young to be exposed to porn.
Unfortunately, anonymity is almost a default setting online, while tying one's identity to every online communication would be not only technically burdensome, but downright dangerous. How would we do anonymous hotlines and tip lines? There would have to be exceptions for such cases. And VPN and other technologies exist that currently encumber even the most vigorous attempts to identify people online, such as in criminal investigations.
The Tea app is facing not only its data-breach problem, which always is disturbing to users, but also the moral question of whether anonymous comments by women about men they have dated are fair to the men. Such a question can be answered on a case-by-case basis, but in general, if women had to sign their real names to every comment they posted on Tea instead of remaining anonymous, the comments might not be as frank as they are now.
The same principle applies to student evaluations conducted not by a commercial app, but by my university. Students are guaranteed anonymity for the obvious reason that if they make a negative comment, and the professor finds out who said it, the student might have to take another one of the professor's classes, in which the professor might be tempted to wreak vengeance upon the unhappy but honest student. So I accept the idea of anonymity in that situation, because I might otherwise be tempted to abuse my authority over students that way.
If Tea were really confined only to women users, there wouldn't seem to be any danger of that sort of thing happening. But a woman could turn traitor, so to speak: seeing a bad review of her current boyfriend on Tea, she could show it to him, and if the review was tied to the identity of the woman who gave him the bad review, he might consider some kind of revenge. That would be bad news as well, so anonymity makes sense for Tea too.
Still, when people know their names are associated with things they say, they tend to be more moderate in their expressions than if they hide behind a pseudonym and can flame to their hearts' content without any fear of retribution. Some systems allow the option of either signing your name or remaining anonymous, and possibly that is the best approach.
Tea presents itself as a way to find "green flags," that is, women going online and saying what a good guy this was and you ought to date him. If he's so good, why not keep him for yourself? Realistically, I expect most of the comments are negative, which is why the site has been criticized to the extent it has been. Assuming the operators of Tea address their data breach, they can take comfort in the old saying attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to P. T. Barnum: "There's no such thing as bad publicity." More women know about Tea now, and so more men may get reviewed. I only hope they get the reviews they deserve.
Sources: The Associated Press article "The Tea app was intended to help women date safely. Then it got hacked," appeared on July 26, 2025 at https://apnews.com/article/tea-app-data-breach-leak-4chan-c95d5bb2cabe9d1b8ec0ca8903503b29. I also referred to an article at https://www.hims.com/news/dating-in-person-vs-online for the statistic about percentage of couples meeting online, and to the Wikipedia article on Tea (app).