Dating app hack won’t stop women from whispering about men

Like many women, my friend — a single mom of two in Atlanta — first heard about Tea Dating Advice on social media.

The app, a tool for women to find and share information about men they are dating or might consider dating, exploded in popularity in late July, attracting millions of prospective users. The app was ranked as one of the top apps for Apple and Google.

Sean Cook founded the app in 2023 after his mom was catfished. Cook said he wanted to provide women with safety tools for online dating.

In addition to allowing women to anonymously upload images of men, flag them for bad behavior and share comments about them with other women, users who pay a fee can also run criminal and background checks, search for sex offenders and do reverse image searches on men all in one place.

Though she isn’t dating anyone at the moment, my friend (whom I won’t name for reasons that will become obvious in the next paragraph) wanted to see if any of the men she had dated appeared in the app.

“I was being nosy,” she said. But right after she downloaded the app and requested to join, Tea was hacked.

It seems some men were upset about the possibility of a woman exposing their bad behavior. The men who vocalized their anger publicly said sharing information about them was an invasion of privacy or defamation. They worried that scorned women would make up false claims and share them with thousands of other women.

According to a recent story in the New York Post, one man was so concerned over what was being said about him that he asked a female friend to join the app and do reconnaissance on his image. The women who outed him were just upset, he said. He had been honest and up front with them.

But if you are sending spies to search for defamatory comments that you think may have been made about you, then you’re also acknowledging the possibility that you might have done something to warrant those comments.

Some men have attempted to use the courts to retaliate, filing lawsuits against individual women, company founders, and social media platforms.

Conceptually, I appreciate what Tea and several other whisper networks of the digital age — Are We Dating the Same Guy on Meta and the defunct website dontdatehimgirl.com — have attempted to create: a space for women to expose the nefarious behavior of men.

Sharing information about the behavior of men is something many women have always done, just on a more personal scale. And doing so almost always comes with risks.

Several decades ago, I told a friend that I saw her boyfriend at a bar with another woman. The two were unquestionably intimate. The friend dismissed my concerns when I shared them, but months later, when she learned through other means that her boyfriend was cheating, she was angry at me for not being more emphatic in my condemnation of his behavior.

When people are looking for a villain, they will always find one.

I imagine some of the men who are upset by Tea feel like they may have become unwitting villains in someone else’s story. And to be fair, some of them probably have been victims of overblown or inaccurate accusations. But going on the attack isn’t going to stop the instinct some women have to warn others about dangerous or harmful men.

Critics of Tea lobbied for someone to hack the app. So someone did. Then an anonymous person shared the data of 72,000 women who had signed up before February 2024. Someone else reportedly created a locator map of the women.

Men have also sought vengeance by creating their own whisper network, most notably TeaOnHer. But the app ratings are low, and users have described it mostly as a place for men to disparage women they may or may not have dated.