Tea was storing its users’ sensitive information on Firebase, a Google-owned backend cloud storage and computing service.
Every time. With startups, it’s always an unsecured Firebase or S3 bucket.
I’m certainly no web security expert, but shouldn’t Tea’s junior network/backend/security developers, let alone seniors, know how to secure said firebase or S3 buckets with STARTTLS or SSL certificates? Shouldn’t a company like this have some sort of compliance department?
It’s a little more complex than that. If you want the app on the user device to be able to dump data directly into your online database, you have to give it access in some way. Encrypting the transmission doesn’t do much if every app installation contains access credentials that can be extracted or sniffed.
Obviously there are ways around this too, but it’s not just “use TLS”.
I am not sure, but I read somewhere that the developer(s) used vibe coding to create the app so…
Change the target to any other group and the outrage would be 100-10000 fold bigger.
Try it out, instead of Women rating men, try subbing in various minority groups or races.
Bonus points for the most offensive combinations…
e.g. Russians rating Ukrainians in your area…it can get pretty bad…I can think of many worse combos.
I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.
However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of “private market solution to systemic problem” that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.
Stats depend on perception. Where a woman reports abuse, a man often spends an evening drinking or something similar. Not reporting abuse.
Expectations of men are too somewhat cruel. You should be grenadier-tall (or gorilla-wide, point being, you should look fit), with facial features like those of Kianu Reeves, with voice like that of Orlando Bloom, confident like some CEO, honorable like a samurai from some movie, yet able to override that honor at her whim and do any atrocity to make the world better for her. Like some picture of 1930s’ propaganda.
If you don’t deliver, then she silently pities herself and silently looks down at you for that. But God forbid you seem like that picture in some regard and then inevitably turn out to be more human, that deceit she won’t forgive.
It was a problem a century ago that women were mostly right-wing and chauvinist and traditionalist. Most of that has been undone, but not how women in average see gender relations.
OK, so about the app - I won’t be surprised if it was an intentional honeypot, honestly, to expose those who will use it. And it’s a bad idea, there’s no way to verify anonymous accusations, which means it’s a tool for defamation of any man, and a way to discredit things of the kind written there at the same time.
These alleged high standards women hold are largely imaginary. It’s only kind of like that on dating apps, and that’s because they’re 80% male, so women HAVE to be picky.
I was making the point, that despite the fact that this is mildly ok. The test for anything that gives one group power over another, is to switch the groups.
If it’s still reasonable, than it is probably OK to keep it. If however it seems wrong after the switch, the bar to keep the power imbalance should be very high.
That’s a very superficial test that deliberately omits the social and historical context that makes sense of these categories. You can’t just insert one party for another in statements about a relationship where one side has more power and privilege than the other, and look at your feelings about the result to evaluate the statements. White people have historically mistreated everyone else and robbed them of freedom and power. Men have historically abused women. To say “let’s swap the words and see how we feel then” is not a reasonable way of evaluating statements about the relationships between these groups.
What this article says about the importance of entrenched power structures in racism also holds true about the relations between men and women:
https://www.aclrc.com/issues/anti-racism/cared/the-basics-level-1/myth-of-reverse-racism/
You can, and do.
It helps set the bar, it is a tool for determining how to assess what level of imbalance is reasonable.
It’s not the only tool, nor an I arguing for it to be.
I’m always reminded of the fact that women on dating sites rate 80% of the men as below average….
And the dating advisors who have written numerous articles about how women don’t really know or aren’t really honest with themselves about what they are looking for in a partner….
That was ONE OKCupid survey from years ago, and it also showed that women were more likely than men to message people they didn’t rate as attractive.
In reality, women and men rate male facial attractiveness about the same. https://datepsychology.com/can-women-identify-an-average-face/
Russians rating Ukrainians
Interesting analogy. You realize you have it backwards, right? Women are the Ukrainians on this scenario.
Agreed, but it is worse the way I put it…
Might want to read up on the origins of Facebook before turning this into a gender wars thing.
Nothing about gender wars here.
Just because Facebook is shit, doesn’t make this any better.
I’m sorry but I’ll just say it out right: new feminists are the absolute worst
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for equality where possible. Where isn’t equality possible? Well I’d like to conceive a child, but the plumbing isn’t exactly useful for that. That sort of thing. Beyond that, were all the same, and IDGAF about your skin color, sexual preferences or whatever. I live by live and Let live, don’t be an asshole, it’s not that hard to be respectful
New feminists though are the ones coming up with ideas like this website. On the surface, anyone could say that it’s not a bad thing to have a place for women to talk about how to protect themselves. In reality though, it’s a place where men, innocent or not, get doxxed and made to be rapists.
There are some subs here on Lemmy as well that were very sad to see this shitshow of a website go, lamenting the fact that now they need a different place to dex people. Try not to tell them that doxxing is bad, it gets you banned.
Ah nice.
Time to implement a social score. Those who rate highly have better access to social areas.
Those who rate lower are fucked for the rest of their life.
This sounds like such an amazing idea that has no shortcomings whatsoever!
Edit: /s
Lots of misandrists in this thread framing security failures as sexism against men
It can be both.
So many problems are caused because society assumes cisgender women are always victims and anything that looks like a man if you look at it long enough is an abuser.
It’s just original Facebook but for women to rate and bully men instead of Mark and his scum bros using it to rate and bully women.
Lots of men in this thread real upset about this app pointing out how the majority men are shit
Defaming people without giving them a chance to defend themselves, talk about shit people…
What are you basing the majority of men are shit on? Confirmation bias?
Honestly it seems like a weapon that can too easily be used for defamation
I mean, yes, but does that take priority over women who are worried about their safety? There’s been women doing this over local Facebook groups for a long time. Defamation of this sort is not a new issue.
Considering even the mere accusation can ruin someone’s life? Yes.
The problem isn’t women don’t deserve to be safe, the problem is we cannot just give people powerful weapons with no oversight or burden of proof to be deployed simply because a date didn’t go well.
Facebook or App, the danger is too great
It was defamation the entire time just because somebody made it an app rather than a Facebook group doesn’t make any difference. It was always a crap thing to do.
Of course Tea took it to an entirely new level of stupid.
It was potentially defamation when it was just women…talking to one another, too. This seems like a pretty solid case of men looking at something women do to protect each other, and saying “…but what about the men who could be negatively affected in some cases?” I also think the tone in which this is being discussed is pretty revealing about Lemmy’s demographics.
How does this app even work?
You sign up and then a while later, your personal information gets leaked to the public. Not sure what its other purpose is.
That’s corporate social media/apps in general. Does this thing basically let people list crappy things that happened to them by specific humans?
it also lists criminal history that might not be disclosed on a dating profile. and other information that might be a red flag.
Regardless of the actual truth of that information.
indeed. there’s the potential for abuse and doxxing. but I think the app could be done in a safe way. and with much less leakery.
How would you implement the app in its current concept, without the possibility for abuse? It seems inherent to the very idea of it.
Yeah, the entire point of the app is that you go there and talk about the bad things a person has done.
That seems pretty hard to identify them without posting their image without their consent and discussing private details of their life so others can identify them. It is creepy as hell, at a minimum.
So, like the Chinese national merit system? That’s super fair and nothing ever goes wrong.
the what? i am not familiar with that.
It’s basically a slander app, from what I can tell.
it seems its an app that helps women flag potential dating candidates as being dangerous or red flags.
there is the potential for doxxing that comes with that, but I can absolutely understand its use and need when not abused in that manner.
i wonder if there’s the potential for a different app with more encryption and a way to prevent doxxing and abuse.
How do you warn people about a potential dating candidate being dangerous without doxxing the potential dating candidate? “Hey, watch out for [anonymous person]” doesn’t sound very useful.
…you know? that’s a fair point. I’m not sure how it would work. but it would be nice to know some stuff if its important.
I have the solution. Nobody’s gonna like it, everybody here is gonna scream at me about it, but I have the solution.
Stop dating strangers on the internet.
The entire personals site/dating app experiment we’ve been running for the last quarter century is obviously a categorical failure. Humans just don’t work like this.
Things have gotten so much worse since I was in high school. When I was in high school, the community of girls available to me to ask out were pretty much all girls I’d known since we were 5. A lot of them, I didn’t have to wonder about their character, their intentions, their capacity to do harm, I was there when all that was written. I remember how much of a bully Chelsea was in middle school, I remember how nice Ashley was to everyone, I remember how Justine seemed weirdly infatuated with me in the 4th grade. They’d all remember stuff about me and the other boys. We graduated high school, I never saw 80% of them ever again, and within 5 years that figure climbed to at least 95%. Four years of college with mostly abject strangers who you’re weirdly fast to form and break deceptively deep bonds with, all of whom I’ve also lost track of, and then the adult world in which everyone including you is an NPC.
I happen to be the exact age where, I got out of college in 2007, I disappeared into work, like I went to the airport and I went home for two years. In 2009, I looked back up and everything had CHANGED. Instant messaging was on smart phones now, and you WERE NOT TO approach women in person, only through phone-based dating apps and you had BETTER FUCKING NOT already be acquainted.
Don’t talk to women at the grocery store. Don’t talk to women at the gym. Don’t talk to women at the library. Don’t talk to women at your work. Don’t talk to women at their work. Don’t talk to women at the coffee shop. Don’t talk to women at the bar. Don’t talk to women at the club. Don’t talk to women. No woman, only app.
How do you meet more women? Oh that’s categorically the wrong question because having the goal of meeting women in the first place is creepy. Stop wanting to meet women and instead organically decide you want to do things that women happen to like, and then accidentally meet women in the course of doing those things. You know, at those meetups that are always happening on a recurring basis, that aren’t advertised to happen at a place and time and then no one shows up and the listing is never re-posted. Probably just install more apps.
It’s been women driving this, men vastly prefer asking women out from within their social circle. The pressure to make the first move is still on men, and he’d rather ask out women he already thinks he might like. Women on the other hand vastly prefer to be cold approached by a charming stranger.
I think it’s gone far enough when we’ve got women saying dumb shit like “Systematically doxxing and libeling men is a risk we’re just going to have to take.”
I feel that the app filled a need of women we should not ignore. But the app, both this specific app and also the overall concept, is just too rife with downsides to be workable.
So we, as men and as society need to reevaluate why women feel the need for such an app, and reinvest in the criminal justice system to hold victimizers more accountable.
It’s okay to call this app and similar Facebook groups unacceptable. But that’s not enough, we must also call for stronger protections for victims of criminal behavior.
It would be interesting to see something similar that required accusations to be backed up with evidence. Police reports, court proceedings and results, news articles etc.
It would also be a lot safer, legally speaking, for the service provider.
Wow just two days ago I see a post about how Lemmy is dominated by men and how that could become a problem, and today I see a comment section where all the incels come out of the woodwork.
“waaa somebody wants to solve a problem that has never affected me I’m the victim”
“omg what if people talk behind my back they might find out I’m an asshole? literally 1984”
“wadabout if this app was racist?!? checkmate”
I’m not saying this app is good or bad (I can definitely see the problems) but if an article about cybersecurity gets posted and this is our first reaction, makes me lose hope in Lemmy.
i mean…an app directly copying a black mirror episode (but almost exclusively targeting a specific demographic) does ring some very, VERY loud alarm bells…
like, this is literally the plot of nosedive.
it’s a social credit system.
and none of the people even know they HAVE a score, so it’s somehow even worse than the fictional scenario.
this will, absolutely, hurt innocents and it will do so by design.
“fuck them innocents!”…just because they happen to be men?
how is that anything other than misandrist?
how is that defensible?
how is doxxing, mass libel, and targeted harassment a solution to sexism and rape culture?
I’d be really interested in hearing anything about how this is supposed to help women, because i struggle to see how sowing massive, unearned distrust between men and women is going to make anyone any safer…
I’m really, REALLY glad that the GDPR would nuke this sort of nonsense from orbit…uploading pictures of strangers, for the explicit purpose of gossiping about them behind their backs, spreading awful rumors?
what. the. actual. fuck. is wrong with you people?
and i don’t mean women, or men: i mean americans and their total disregard for privacy and digital safety. what the hell…
“waaa somebody wants to solve a problem that has never affected me I’m the victim”
Everyone has the problem that they’d want to discuss others behind their back. It’s not accepted because it doesn’t work to any good end.
“omg what if people talk behind my back they might find out I’m an asshole? literally 1984”
You won’t find out anything from this. People sometimes lie, especially in such situations.
but if an article about cybersecurity gets posted and this is our first reaction, makes me lose hope in Lemmy.
Human adequacy is a big part of cybersecurity.
You make a valid point, this platform absolutely shits on anyone without technical knowledge, just look at the hundred or so smug replies telling you what flavor of Linux they run if you mention a problem with Windows. So, no surprise everyone is focusing on that, and not the human aspect here.
Having said that, there is a power imbalance to this that I really don’t like, the accuser gets to hide behind a veil of anonymity, and the accused has their name published, and is forced to defend themselves.
Yeah, this app sucks for a variety of reasons, but holy shit the misogyny in this thread.
Thanks for looking out for us. However, I, too, am a bit concerned. This is how Facebook started. The tech industry has zero ethics. I recommend women, AND men, have a trusted safety buddy when dating. When I met my spouse, I had two people who knew where I was, the person’s name, photo, employer, and where we were meeting.Do some internet stalking. If I don’t call you in an hour, come looking for me. If I call, I might ask for another hour, but you get the point.
