You could say they “spilled the tea”.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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These people should serve jail time. I'm not kidding.
I'm no lawyer, but this seems like at least grounds for a class action lawsuit, I would think. Like, it seems like privacy and security is implied (however ironic for an app like this) when requiring users to upload their PII.
Also, I assume their privacy policy didn't mention that they were just gonna publish their users' PII.
Almost definitely both were involved.
Hack has at least two definitions in a computing context.
- A nifty trick or shortcut that is useful. "Check out this hack to increase your productivity."
- Accessing something you shouldn't. "They hacked into the database."
A lot of times they sort of get used in conjunction to describe interesting ways to gain access to secure systems, but using it to describe accessing insecure things you shouldn't is still a valid usage of the phrase.
That said I definitely wanna see the company face charges for this, this is insane.
Yeah, if I leave my house door wide open for a few weeks and I get robbed, it's still burglary.
Terrible analogy. A webserver is not at all like a door. It doesn't block or allow traffic to and from your file system.
A web server is more like a receptionist. It handles requests. "Can I have your basic catalog?" "Certainly, here you go."
"Can I get this item from your basic catalog?" "Certainly."
"I don't see it in your catalog, but my buddy said he got this other item from you. Can I have this other item too?" "Absolutely."
"Can I borrow your stapler?" Sure. "How about a pad of paper?" "Of Course". "Can I just have the contents of your supply closet?" "Here you go." "How about your accounting files, can I get those?" "No problem!" "How about your entire customer list?" "Consider it done!"
When you hire a receptionist and specifically tell them to give customers anything they request, that's entirely on you. You have to at least make a token effort to restrict access to only authorized users before you can even claim that a particular user was unauthorized.
This wasn't burglary. This was putting up signs that say "come in" and labeling everything in your house with "free" stickers.
In a legal context there's also the concept of a "reasonable expectation of privacy". The computer abuse and fraud act defines hacking as accessing data or systems you are not authorized to access.
A better analogy is putting your journal in a public library and getting mad when somone reads it.
I'm not saying what these ass holes did was right, I'm saying that the company weakened their legal position by not protecting the data.
Terrible analogy. You have permission to read books in a library.
Forgetting to lock your door isn't granting permission to people enter your house, and it doesn't grant people permission to take your valuables. It may be neglectful to leave your door unlocked, but it doesn't imply granting permission to enter your house.
Same goes with computer security. Leaving your computer insecure may be neglectful, but it does not imply someone has permission to take your data.
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A better analogy is putting your journal in a public library and getting mad when someone reads it.
Good analogy indeed. I'd go one step further and add: it's like promising others you'll keep their diary safe, then putting it in a public library, to then get mad when someone reads it.
Yeah the internet by design is a public space, and we must be responsible and treat it as such when handling sensative data.
Again, it was very wrong for people to take that data and especially to post like that.
The company also has to do their part and produce at least some kind of barrier to the data.
Even using UUIDs and making sure the data wasn't query-able would have been something.
The web is a public space by design. The internet? I don't think you can make that case well. Https and all that. Private infra abounds.
The data was on the public web in this case
Thank you! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading people's reactions to this. And if it was a business instead of your house and it was customer data you weren't protecting you should still be in trouble too. It's like people think only one side can be in the wrong in this or that because the data wasn't secured and in the public that gives them free reign to post it everywhere. I wonder how those people would feel if their addresses were leaked. Afterall, if you're a homeowner your name is attached to the property and is publicly accessible.
No, this was a data leak. The word "hack" has legal implications and shifts the blame away from the company and onto the individual who discovered the leak.
It can be both. The company can be at fault for not keeping something secure while the people who steal the data are at fault for stealing data. Data leaks and hacks are not mutually exclusive.
I don't disagree with your main point, but I'm not sure it's really even "stealing", as that means to take without permission. In this case, the storage permissions were configured so that the files were publicly available to everyone, so everyone had permission to access them.
Semantics though. It's still unethical to access that data, even if it's not technically stealing.
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Guess someone spilled the tea
What is the Tea hack?
An app called Tea™ was marketed as a safespace for women and used government issued IDs as a way to verify users.
4Chan users leaked all of the IDs onto the larger internet.
So it essentially became a honey trap, either through malice or sheer incompetence.
Well, I get what you mean, but a "honey trap" idiom in English, also called a "honeypot scheme", usually refers to utilizing romantic connections to influence people to make decisions or release confidential information.
Honeypot is a common term in computing/cybersecurity, setting up fake important servers so bad actors invade and the security team can analyze what got in and how to deal with it.
Well it doesnt surprise me that the IT team doesn't know about a sexual terminology, tbh.
Wow what a fuckin shitshow. I have so many follow-up questions
dev came from marketing. pictures wouldn't show up with all that security enabled.
I always get irrationally angry when i see python code using os.path instead of pathlib. What is this, the nineties?
Make a PR
Be the change you want to see in the world.
What big advantages does pathlib provide? os.path works just fine
- Everything is in one library which offers consistency for all operations.
- You can use forward slashes on Windows paths, which makes for much better readability.
- You can access all the parts of a pathlib object with attributes like .stem, .suffix or .parent.
- You can easily find the differences between paths with .relative_to()
- You can easily build up complex paths with the / operator (no string additions).
Just off the top of my head.
I suppose os.path is simpler? It's a string and operation.
Python is all about 'attention efficiency,' which there's something to be said for. People taking the path of least resistance (instead of eating time learning the more complex/OOP pathlib) to bang out their script where they just need to move a file or something makes sense. I'm with you here, but it makes sense.
...Also, os.path has much better Google SEO, heh.
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And what's with the string addition? Never heard of f-strings or even .format()?
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At this point I think the women using it got psyopped
crack heads, meth heads, what's the diff
Believe it or not a lot of hacking is more like this than you think.
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I absolutely despise Firebase Firestore (the database technology that was "hacked"). It's like a clarion call for amateur developers, especially low rate/skill contractors who clearly picked it not as part of a considered tech stack, but merely as the simplest and most lax hammer out there. Clearly even DynamoDB with an API gateway is too scary for some professionals. It almost always interfaces directly with clients/the internet without sufficient security rules preventing access to private information (or entire database deletion), and no real forethought as to ongoing maintenance and technical debt.
A Firestore database facing the client directly on any serious project is a code smell in my opinion.
Ah yes, Firebase. The Google version of leaking all your company data through a public S3 bucket
I remember when they launched and started pushing it in the Android dev community. Actually won a Google Pixel at a Firebase sponsored hackathon in my town...after that I never touched Firestore again. Using that ACL language to restrict access, you could see the massive foot gun from a mile away
It's like people learn how to make a phone app in React Native or whatever, but then come to the shocking and unpleasant realisation that a data-driven service isn't just a shiny user interface - it needs a backend too.
But they don't know anything about backend, and don't want to, because as far as they are concerned all those pesky considerations like data architecture, availability, security, integrity etc are all just unwanted roadblocks on the path to launching their shiny app.
And so, when a service seemingly provides a way to build an app without needing to care about any of those things, of course they take it.
And I get it, I really do. The backend usually is the genuine hard part in any project, because it's the part with all the risk. The part with all the problems. The place where everything can come crashing down or leak all your data if you make bad decisions. That's the bothersome nature of data-driven services.
But that's exactly why the backend is important, and especially the part you can't build anything decent without thinking about.
I think it's less about the tech picked and more about developers with no sense of security and a poor understanding of networking. I've seen far too many web applications where the developer needed some sort of database behind it (MySQL, PostGres, MSSQL) and so they stood up either a container or entire VM with a public IP and whatever the networking layer set to allow any IP to hit the database port. The excuse is almost always something like, "we needed the web front end to be able to reach the database, so we gave the database server/container a public IP and allowed access". Which is wonderful, right up until half of the IP addresses in Russia start trying to brute force the database.
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