'The Tea App was supposed to expose bad men. Instead, it exposed the women using it.'

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Since the first humans stepped blinking out of caves, the need for women to share information has been vital to our survival. 

While men might traditionally have been out spearing sabre-toothed tigers, it was typically the women of the clan who needed to share and collaborate in order to get ahead. 

From which berries were poisonous and shouldn't be eaten, to where the best shelter was and which cave bro was currently in a violent mood — the sharing of information with one another has remained a constant for women throughout our evolution. 

And because some homosapiens haven't done a lot of that evolution since those early human times, sharing information about men specifically has remained one of the ways in which women keep safe. 

Watch: Mamamia Out Loud Discussing Dating Apps. Post continues below. 

Now, there's an app for that

Enter: Tea - a women-only dating advice app currently exploding in popularity in the US, where users are able to anonymously post pictures of men they're dating to see whether other users have any 'tea' to spill on their character.

The app allows users to share 'reviews' of men, including their names, photos and stories about their behaviour, and the app also features a background check tool, reverse image search capabilities and phone number lookup. It is reportedly the largest dating group chat for American women.

Created by Sean Cook, a software developer from San Francisco, the app came about as a solution to his mum's romantic woes, after the tech prodigy witnessed her being catfished at the age of 60.

Cook quickly found, however, that his mum's experience was only the tip of the iceberg.

"My mum's challenges with online dating were upsetting - and eye-opening," he recently told startup news hub Grit Daily.

"However, when I brought it up with my friends, I learned it wasn't just my mum who was going through this; every woman I spoke to had a similar story."

It turns out, the ubiquity of crappy dating experiences among women has translated into wild success for Cook's product. And let's not be glib — for an unacceptable number of women, the umbrella of 'crappy dating experiences' all too often involves physical or sexual violence. 

Tea has pledged to donate 10 per cent of revenue to the U.S National Domestic Violence Hotline in recognition of this.

This month, it became the number one app in the US App Store, with almost four million users at the time of publication. 

And while some are praising it as the answer to every single woman's dodgy dating woes, others are warning it's a breeding ground for defamation, doxxing and privacy breaches.

Revolutionary or litigious nightmare? 

There's precedence here in Australia for precisely this type of drama.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of Facebook and WhatsApp groups where women essentially perform many of the activities available on the Tea app.

'Are We Dating The Same Guy?' and 'Sis Is This Your Man?' and my personal favourite, 'Sis, Is This Your Man (Prison Edition)' are just some of the groups that popped up. 

But many of these groups have been temporarily paused or shut down completely, after fears of legal culpability were raised when an Australian Facebook group administrator was sued for defamation over a comment he made. 

While the group in question related to Australian Surrogacy, the writing from the case (which was settled out of court in the end) was on the wall: what you post online about other people can be held against you. 

"This app carries huge risk," explains Jade Carlson, special counsel in the commercial litigation team at Gold Coast law firm Attwood Marshall Lawyers. 

"Here in Australia, how it works is that if someone publishes material which carries what we call defamatory imputation - meaning the impact of what is said - that can be prosecuted as defamation," explained Carlson.

"In terms of Tea, the risk involves two people - the person making the post, who, even if they're anonymous, could be identified through expert reports and so forth, and the app administrators."

"You can see it happening," she continues, "someone will slam somebody else on that kind of app, and whilst there might even be some things that are truthful in the post, when somebody reads it, they're going to have a different opinion about that person after reading it than they otherwise would have formed. And had they known all the facts, maybe the information wouldn't have carried the same effect. So that's kind of the problem with it, as I see it."

Emerging privacy crisis - and not just for men

As it turns out, expert warnings about the privacy risks of the app were only the tip of the iceberg, as it was revealed two days ago that a major hack to the app had stolen 59,000 images and direct messages from members who had joined the site prior to February 2024.

In a statement, Tea announced it had taken the affected storage system offline, in "an abundance of caution."

The irony of the breach — in which women seeking to improve their online safety have now been made vulnerable— is a blow to the entire premise, which aimed to remove just a little bit of the risk involved in online dating.

Mamamia has reached out to Tea for comment.

Feature images: Getty