What’s incredibly popular, just as polarizing and not, as it turns out, a comforting drink?
Tea.
The U.S.-based women-only dating service app with more than four million users surged to viral status in July after gaining traction on social media for its ability to mark men as red flags as a warning to others interested in dating them. According to research firm Sensor Tower, the app has been downloaded two million times in the last month.
Marketed as “helping women date safe” and described as “basically Yelp for men,” Tea is currently the No. 1 lifestyle download in the U.S. App Store — but it’s also the topic of heated debate about safety and privacy, been called “a man-shaming app” targeted by men’s rights groups and now it’s been hacked.
San Francisco-based Tea Dating Advice said in a statement posted to its website on July 25 that some 72,000 images — including 13,000 selfies and photo IDs used for account verification — were leaked online. Then on Tuesday, Tea posted that it had suspended direct messaging after becoming aware that some messages had been accessed during the data breach, too.
A spokesperson for Tea confirmed the data breach in an email to CBC News on Thursday, adding that it’s “working to identify any users whose personal information was involved and will be offering free identity protection services to those individuals.”
Tea was reportedly intended to launch in Canada on Friday, according to information previously posted on the App Store, but as of this week the launch date is now in February 2026. Tea didn’t respond to CBC’s questions about the apparent delay.
Yet even amid the current turmoil, Tea’s waitlist has ballooned to 1.5 million women, all eager to join, the company posted on Wednesday. A day later, Tea posted in its Instagram stories that it had approved “well over” 800,000 women into the app that day alone.
So, why is it so popular, despite the drama and risks?
After years of swiping, have we reached the point of dating app burnout? Therapists and researchers say that might be the case.
Many women feel unsafe dating online: study
Women don’t feel safe, so a dating app that centres on safety is going to hit home in a big way, said Treena Orchard, an associate professor in the School of Health Studies at Western University in London, Ont., and the author of Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and The Darker Side of Dating Apps.
“The main players in the dating app industry have not proven themselves to really double down on safety in ways that prevent certain forms of violence or misogyny, and the popularity of this app reflects how frustrating this is to women,” Orchard told CBC News.
One in five women experience online harassment in Canada, according to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, and Statistics Canada notes that Indigenous women, bisexual women and women between the ages of 15 and 24 are even more at risk.
A 2023 Pew Research Center study in the U.S. found that women were far more likely than men to say online dating wasn’t safe — 57 per cent of women compared with 41 per cent of men.
Ipsos polled more than 6,000 adults in the U.S. for its report. It noted that 43 per cent of women under 50 who used dating apps said someone had continued to search for them after they said they weren’t interested, 37 per cent said they’d been called an offensive name and 11 per cent reported they’d received threats of physical harm.
Canadians reported $58 million in romance scam losses to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre in 2024. CBC’s Ali Chiasson breaks down the romance red flags that Ontario police want the public to be aware of.
There are also multiple murder and rape cases where perpetrators have used dating websites to find victims. In March, Calgary police issued a warning of a man using online dating apps to sexually assault women.
In addition, the RCMP has issued warnings about romance scams, where victims are contacted on dating apps for the purposes of obtaining their money.
“Marking men with red flags is helpful in alerting women to a known offender or violent person,” Orchard said.
App facing backlash from men, who want it shut down
Tea allows users to find “verified green flag men,” run background checks, identify potential catfish, check for a criminal history and verify that a man isn’t a sex offender, according to the app’s website. Users can also share experiences and anonymous dating reviews.
But one problem, Orchard said, is that the app also fosters conversations about more superficial things, like a man’s appearance, body odour, conversation skills or romantic prowess.
And then there’s the backlash. Cleveland lawyer Aaron Minc, who specializes in cases involving online defamation and harassment, told The Associated Press that his firm has received hundreds of calls from people upset about what’s been posted about them on Tea.
A campaign on the men’s rights subreddit urges people to report Tea, saying it “must be deleted.” Another campaign in the same subreddit outlines a six-step action plan to get Tea shut down, including pursuing civil lawsuits.
“It’s just an echo chamber for women to shit on men, gossip or spread rumours,” posted someone in the comments of one of the Reddit campaigns.
Generally, people are legally allowed to provide opinions about other people in public forums, and truth is an absolute defence in defamation cases, said lawyer Tina Yang, a partner in the Toronto office of law firm Goldblatt Partners LLP who specializes in privacy law.
Charles Daoust, an Ottawa lawyer who specializes in defamation cases, said exaggerating or not being completely truthful can be dangerous when posting about others online.
What you can’t do is breach someone’s privacy, Yang said, and what’s considered private is contextual. So it’s possible someone could sue over what was written about them on Tea, she said, pointing to legal precedent where people have been successfully sued for defamation over negative Google reviews.
There’s also the potential for criminal consequences if the posts meet the bar for harassment, Yang said.
“I, personally, would not post on Tea,” she said. “The potential for things to go awry is pretty high.”
The tea on Tea’s data breach
Applicants have to be approved in order to join, Tea explained online. The process once required selfies and government photo ID to verify the users, it said, “as an added layer of safety to ensure that only women were signing up for the app.”
The company said it removed the ID requirement in 2023, but data that was stored before February 2024, when Tea migrated to a more secure system, was accessed in the breach. According to an investigation by 404 Media, users on the notorious image-based bulletin board 4chan claimed to have discovered an exposed database, and it posted women’s photos and information online.
A website viewed by CBC News lists what it says are the Tea selfies and lets people rank them by order of attractiveness. According to The Atlantic, 4chan users also created a map that claimed to link Tea users to certain locations, and told people viewing it to “enjoy.”
At least two class-action lawsuits have been filed against Tea as of Monday, according to Business Insider. One, filed by Tea user Griselda Reyes, claims she “has anxiety and increased concerns for the loss of privacy, as well as anxiety over the impact of cybercriminals accessing, using and selling [her] private Information.
Yang said she hopes that risk would make potential users of the app think carefully before they download it. Orchard, too, said she thinks users should avoid Tea, at least until the security system and data breach protocol are fixed.
Tea hadn’t posted any further updates about the data breach as of Friday afternoon. But it did post a promotional video on Instagram advertising its features.
The comments were almost entirely from people asking Tea to approve them, so they could join the app.
www.cbc.ca (Article Sourced Website)
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