Subj : The Tea App Breach - 60GB of Personal Info
To   : All
From : LundukeJournal
Date : Fri Jul 25 2025 22:45:07

The Tea App Breach - 60GB of Personal Info

Date:
Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:42:03 GMT

Description:
Selfies, Drivers Licenses, & Locations. All made publicly available by the 
developer.

FULL STORY
======================================================================

The  Tea App   an online dating app marketed as a dating tool that protects 
women  has been hacked.  And a lot of data has been exposed.  An extreme 
amount. 

Not the first major breach this year.  And it certainly wont be the last. 

First published over on 4Chan (of course), the hack of Tea App wasnt even 
really much of a hack.  The developers of Tea App apparently simply left the 
user data open for the world to download at their leisure. 

And Tea App was becoming pretty popular  which means roughly 60 GB of user 
data was made available before the developers finally thought about locking 
things down. 

What kind of data was made publicly available  because, presumably, the 
developers simply didnt think about security much  by this Tea App Hack? 

Selfies.  Drivers licenses.  All manner of private information which will, no 
doubt, be exploited by unscrupulous types over the days to come. 

Even worse  meta data appears to have been preserved on uploaded photos.  
Meaning that many of the user selfies included location data (in addition to 
the address on the drivers license).  Which said unscrupulous types have 
already begun using to create maps of Tea App users. 

The developers of Tea App have put out a statement which says 59,000 images 
used for account verification were made available (read: Government ID).  
Which would already be catastrophic however a quick look at details of the 
data (including the file size alone) would suggest that number could be much, 
much larger. 

Here is the full statement from the developer: 

Which brings us to an important lesson which we  as humans  never seem to 
learn: 

If user data is stored, it will get hacked. 

Its simply a matter of time. 

There are currently close to 15 Billion (with a B) accounts listed on Have I 
Been Pwned .  And those are simply from hacks and breaches which were 
reported to that one website. 

The reality is, the vast majority of hacks and data breaches are never made 
publicly known.  Either by the people doing the hacking, or by the company / 
government which got hacked. 

As systems continue to grow ever more complex and interconnected  and more 
systems become AI-developed (aka Vibe Coded)  these hacks and breaches become 
easier to pull off. 

Combine that with the ever-expanding quantity of data  and the growing number 
of services storing it  and we are quickly reaching a point where everyone 
will have at least some of their data breached at some point.  For some 
people it will happen regularly.  Repeatedly. 

And those will just be the breaches we find out about. 

The only way to minimize the damage of such hacks & breaches is to minimize 
the amount and type of data stored, long term, by a service. 

Need pictures of government ID for age verification?  Delete that picture 
immediately after verification. 

Need payment and shipping information?  Delete all of it immediately after 
payment is processed and shipment is verified. 

Need location data (GPS, IP, etc.)?  Delete it immediately once done with it. 

You get the point.  Unless a piece of personal data is absolutely 100% 
necessary, delete it. 

Its hard for a hacker to obtain files that arent there.



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Link to news story:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-tea-app-breach-60gb-of-personal


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