Overlook ChatGPT. Tea is essentially the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Retailer. via NewsFlicks

Probably the most downloaded unfastened app on Apple’s App Retailer lately is not ChatGPT, Threads or Google. It is Tea, a relationship recommendation app that shall we ladies evaluation males they have got long gone out with, in addition to warn different unmarried ladies about dates they declare went awry.

Tea Courting Recommendation, an app for serving to ladies vet their dates, may be a best app at the Google Play Retailer, the place it is been downloaded greater than 100,000 instances. 

The app’s maker says it gives a measure of safety for customers that conventional relationship apps do not. Tea does not fit singles with attainable dates; quite, it is a position for ladies to proportion details about males they have got dated. Tea shall we customers run background exams on attainable suits, take a look at to peer if they’ve felony data or seem on intercourse wrongdoer databases, and extra, throughout the app. 

The app additionally guarantees that customers who enroll are ladies via soliciting for that they put up a selfie for verification. That is aimed toward protective customers in opposition to so-called catfishing schemes, wherein other people create pretend on-line personas, ceaselessly as a part of a scheme to defraud others.

Tea declined to remark for this text. 

Protection in numbers

To make sure, many of the options that Tea gives exist already. Social media boards, such because the Fb workforce referred to as “Are we relationship the similar man?,” additionally let ladies evaluate notes about their dates in a neighborhood discussion board. The primary distinction: scale. Tea has greater than 1.6 million customers, in keeping with its website online.

“What this app appears to be doing is centralizing all that into one very massive neighborhood,” Doug Zytko, an affiliate professor on the College of Michigan-Flint who researches human-computer interactions for protection, instructed CBS MoneyWatch. 

Zytko, who has widely studied relationship app designs, mentioned that protection “has no longer been prioritized” for many such equipment out there, which he mentioned is helping give an explanation for why Tea has struck a chord with ladies. 

“The relationship app security features that exist are in large part reactive in nature. They are no longer about preserving other people secure, however are punitive movements one can take after one thing has befell,” he added. 

Zytko additionally said the troubles of a few males, voiced on boards like Reddit, that Tea customers may just proportion false details about them.

“If erroneous details about a person is being shared, that damages his relationship potentialities and social popularity,” Zytko mentioned. “That is horrifying, however it is not a explanation why to bargain the app.”

Any other attainable possibility is one commonplace to all social media platform, and virtual knowledge extra extensively. Tea showed to CBS Information that its app used to be hacked Friday morning, with dangerous actors gaining access to an information garage gadget containing knowledge, together with selfies, that contributors had uploaded previous to February 2024. 

Moreover, hackers accessed virtually 60,000 photographs from posts, plus feedback and direct messages, the corporate mentioned.

“Tea has engaged third-party cybersecurity professionals and are operating across the clock to safe its techniques,” the corporate mentioned in a observation, noting that it’s investigating the incident. “Right now, there is not any proof to signify that further person information used to be affected.”