alleged database leak!

Bonjour,

Back in New York and couldn’t be happier to be sweating in these streets.

However:

ily,

Writer: Natasha 
Editor: Deana & Miranda

“The shipping spree has just started, and it won't end anytime soon.” - Sandeep, Founder & CEO of Polygon. Go off, king.

A few weeks ago in this newsletter, I wrote about the sleeper success of the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups. I later learned that the concept of these groups had evolved into a cash cow of an app.

A non–venture-backed tech business with over 1 million users is impressive. But yesterday, the app Tea Dating Advice entered a whole new dimension, hitting #1 in the Apple App Store.

Over the past few weeks, Tea, a platform that allows women to anonymously post reviews and photos of men they’ve dated or matched with on dating apps, went viral and took over the internet.

The onboarding flow lays out some rules and safety tools, which for the most part demonstrate the intended seriousness of the app's purpose: to help women date safely and warn each other about catfishing, harassment, and abuse.

Once in the app, the flow looks something like this:

In a surprise to absolutely no one, it’s mostly men getting exposed for being married, cheaters, or…. a Republican.

You might be wondering why an app that’s been around since 2023 has suddenly topped the charts and received over 900,000 requests to join just this week.

With anything that blows up online, there’s always a bit of sorcery at play. But a huge part of the app’s success yesterday is that men are freaking the fuck out about it. Claiming defamation, sparking controversy, and sharing tips on how to get their profiles removed.

While the criticism is very fair, it is wildly ironic that you can thank the male panic for the app spreading like wildfire. It’s a little bit like:

The headlines are a mix of ‘This is the worst thing to ever happen to men’ and ‘What do you expect women to do?’

Now, if there is one type of dude I do not want to piss off, it’s an incel on 4chan. As of this morning, there are reports (people posting on Reddit and Twitter) that the database has been hacked and the identities of the reviewers will be leaked.

Sorry, but crypto fixes this. We don’t need to be uploading photos of our IDs to privately owned databases anymore, but that’s for a whole other newsletter.

For the girl trying to figure out if her date is going to pay for dinner, maybe this hack is NBD. But for women reporting stalking and abusive behavior, having their home address doxxed has very serious consequences.

While working on this newsletter today, I’ve seen some tremendously bone-chilling bad takes, and I do not wish to contribute to that. So, I’ll just leave you with this: