Absent broader regulation, we all know that apps like Tea depend HEAVILY on user trust. However, I am a bit concerned users either won't fully grasp the severity of this breach or won't care enough and end up sticking with the app regardless.

A somewhat embarrassing but relevant example: my friends and I used Grindr for years (many still do), and we remained loyal despite the company's terrible track record with user data, privacy, and security as there simply wasn't (and still isn't) a viable alternative offering the same service at the expected level.

It appears Tea saw a pretty large pop in discussion across social channels over the last few days so I'm pretty hopeful this will lend itself to widespread discussion where the users can understand just how poorly this reflects on the company and determine if they want to stick around or jump ship.

Or maybe require them to prominently disclose the breech to all current and future users on the app main screen for some period of time afterward (a year or two?). Sort of like the health-code inspection ratings posted in restaurant windows.

That cuts to the issue some other comments have pointed out, that user trust is really their most important capital – and with short attention spans and short news cycles, it may rebound surprisingly fast.

Companies, especially American ones, see data as an asset, rather than a liability.

The GDPR in Europe attempts to reset this but it’s still an uphill battle

> Appropriate regulation should make this an offense punishable by a large fine.

And some kind of legal penalty for the engineers as well. Just fining the company does nothing to change the behavior of the people who built it in the first place.

No they got more, 23gb of files.

Not a fan of the "vibe coding" hype, but is there any evidence that this app was built that way?

The cynical part of me feels like certain employees had uncontrolled access to the user data.

There would be a morbid irony in the idea of a tool marketed as increasing safety for women actually being a honeypot operation to accumulate very sensitive personal information on those very women.

I think we can treat it as currency. All nine letters of my SSN, for example, I’ll allow you to store those if in return I get to store the name of the CEO’s boat.