The Tea app and the future of online surveillance

Proving You’re One Thing Online Means Proving Everyone Else Isn’t

The era of the digital public commons is clearly coming to an end. Even before the big tech monopolies that created it started to lose interest in maintaining it, users were already moving towards more closed communication platforms. Political radicalization, rotting public platforms, the proliferation of AI, and government censorship around the world have all exacerbated this. There was a day when most millennials posted on their Myspace page for the last time. It seems clear that we are heading towards a similar day in the very near future where we will all go through that again, but for the internet as a whole.

But there are huge issues with transitioning from a largely public, semi-anonymous public social internet to a more private, censored, or “Verified,” patchwork of smaller communities and country-level regulatory sectors. The biggest one being security. And last week we saw two massive fuck ups that, on the surface, feel very different, but are both connected to the same problem. How do you prove what you are online without proving everyone else isn’t that? Let me explain.

Last Friday was the deadline for platforms and websites to comply with the UK’s new Online Safety Act, which requires age verification for “harmful content,” ostensibly targeting pornography. But as you’ll see in a sec, it doesn’t just stop there. Content providers must either institute age verification, through facial recognition or other digital identity verification tools, for British visitors or face fines up to £18 million. So now, if you visit a site like Pornhub in the UK, you have to sign in first with a service like Gmail that verifies your age based off data from your email inbox. And the roll out of these rules has been an unmitigated disaster.

Users in the UK were blocked from seeing protest footage on X after law enforcement attacked a peaceful pro-Palestine demonstration in Leeds. Discord mods were booted from their own servers. And one X user took a screenshot of the subreddit r/cider asking users for a photo ID.

You can also bypass the entire thing by using the photo mode from Death Stranding. According to one X user, you can also disable it with a couple lines of code. But you should probably just use a VPN, which is absolutely the safest thing to do here. Because Britain has just created a ticking time bomb of sensitive personal information. And British internet users just have to hope that it is never weaponized against them by a hostile government or just leaks out. The latter being exactly what happened in the US over the weekend.

An app called Tea was shooting up through the App Store this month and causing a huge meltdown among men on both Reddit and X. It asked users for photo or ID verification to prove that they were women and then allowed them to basically post reviews of guys in their area. The app was marketed as a way to protect women from abusers, but, obviously, it spun out of control pretty quickly. As Kate Lindsay in Embedded wrote, “Tea was doomed from the start,” arguing that there was never going to be an app-based solution for this that didn’t devolve into cyberbullying. And Clare Haber-Harris over at Cartoons Hate Her went further, declaring, “No matter who the target is — men, women, or anyone else — apps and sites like this just shouldn’t exist.” And then, over the weekend, all of the users’ personal info leaked.

According to a spokesperson from Tea, 72,000 images, which included verification selfies and government IDs, were stolen in the hack. Though calling it a hack feels a little much tbh. According to the “hackers,” the app’s security was so weak that all of this data was completely unencrypted and kept in a public directory accessible by a couple clicks.

If you’re wondering what hackers did once they got all of that data, here’s a sampling: The images were posted to 4chan. The locations included in the IDs were then used to create a searchable public map of Tea users. X users are now sharing screenshots of a new app someone made that has been loaded with all of the Tea users’ selfies that lets you vote on which ones are the hottest and ranks them on a global leaderboard. To say nothing of the women who now have their faces and legal names plastered all over the web by deranged incels. Oh, also, all of the photos of men who had their images posted to the app without their consent were leaked, as well.

Now, imagine all of this happening to an entire country. “The biggest story on US Twitter being an app leaking all of its users ID’s while in the UK it’s the government rolling out ID verification to access the internet and claiming it’s perfectly safe,” engineer Adam Wren wrote on X.

Over the last few years, would-be tech experts like writer Jonathan Haidt have advocated for an internet without anonymity. The US even has its own version of the Online Safety Act called the Kids Online Safety Act, a bipartisan bill that has been kicking around for a couple years now. The argument for laws like this is that they’ll make the internet safer for children, especially for teenage girls, everyone’s favorite demographic to fret over. And whenever the question arises of how you would enforce such a law, you will hear that there are actually very simple, tech-based solutions we can use.

But proving that an internet user is underage means you also have to prove that everyone else isn’t. Monitoring one kind of user means monitoring everyone else. Similarly, proving that a users is a woman poses the same problem — with the additional thorniness of defining what a “woman” is. A quandary Tea didn’t survive long enough to reckon with. But the lesson from all of this is that there is no simple solution here. Instead, we have found ourselves facing two choices. Fight for the chaotic, open internet that allows anonymity — and all of the good and bad that comes with it. Or continue to slide into an internet that feels safer, but surveils our every move and will inevitably censor what we see and do, supported by massive databases of our most embarrassing and sensitive data. It seems like we know where this is all headed, but at the very least, after this weekend, we won’t be able to pretend to be shocked when it all blows up in our face.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Remove your personal data from Google and ChatGPT

Have you ever searched for your personal information on Google or ChatGPT? You'd be shocked to find out what people can find out about you.

Your name, phone number, and home address are just the beginning. Anyone deeply researching you can find out about your family members and relationships, SSN, health records, financial accounts, and employment history.

Incogni's Unlimited plan puts you back in control of your online privacy, keeping you safer from harmful scams, identity theft, financial fraud, and other threats impacting your physical safety.

Use code DAYDEAL today to get an exclusive 55% discount on unlimited removals from anywhere that exposes your data.

How To Dress Like The Coolest Bear

I think my mom really wanted me to dress like these bears when I was growing up.

What’s The Deal With The New Sydney Sweeney Jeans Commercial?

There is A LOT of discourse about this new Sydney Sweeney American Eagle campaign. To concisely sum up the conflicting sides here, there are a lot of progressives and leftists that feel like Sweeney’s ad, which is based around the joke that she has “great jeans,” as in “great genes,” is a Nazi dogwhistle and a sign of the further right-wing slide of the country. On the other side are a bunch of conservative men, particularly on X, saying, “actually, no, it’s just a jeans ad, but, also, Sydney Sweeney is hot and will help us secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

There’s a second ad in the campaign that leans even further into the weird white nationalist undertones of the whole thing:

I don’t actually think American Eagle meant to go full blood and soil here. Brands are stupid, after all. But I do think there is a concerted effort from the far right to code everything that heterosexual men might like as being inherently conservative. This was the big play with the manosphere podcasters and the Trump campaign last year. (A coalition that is actually not aging super well thanks to both the Palestinian genocide and the Epstein Files scandal.)

So the TL;DR here, in my opinion, is that the ad wasn’t trying to dogwhistle anything, but conservatives are more than happy to embrace it — and also gaslight liberals who are mad about it.

MrBeast Is Making An Animated Show

MrBeast announced a new animated series called MRBEAST LAB, which is apparently premiering in October. I guess it’ll be on YouTube? A few things here. First, why does MrBeast look awkward and charisma-less even animated? How is that possible?

Second, I don’t want to overstate MrBeast’s grand strategy here, but I do think this is an intellectual property play. MrBeast is the biggest YouTuber of all time and he has, so far, struggled to transition to bigger, more established forms of media and also fend off his imitators on YouTube. Online platforms are not good for intellectual property. They incentivize easily-replicated trends or formats over unique content. There is nothing MrBeast does that couldn’t just be done by another creator who has a similar budget. So he has to build lore and an animated show aimed at children is a perfect way to start making some.

A Snyder Cut Guy Is Stalking James Gunn

A big supporter of the #RestoreTheSnyderCut movement, who goes by Skiiwalker Tha Jedi, showed up to Hall H at Comic Con over the weekend with the plan of “infiltrating” the Peacemaker panel and put his “boot on the neck of James Gunn.” He’s posted several livestreams about it.

The Snyder Cut community is basically in free fall right now thanks to the box office success of the new Superman movie. And if you haven’t checked in on these guys in a while, they operate exactly like QAnon. There are influencers that rile them up (and monetize them) and a whole bunch of incoherent conspiracy theories. If you want a concise summary of how it ended up that way, you should check out this episode of Panic World we released earlier this month. Now in video form!

How To Save A PNG Of A Bird To A Bird

Audio producer and YouTuber Benn Jordon accomplished something kind of an amazing. He took a PNG of a bird, converted it to a spectrogram, which made it playable audio. He then visited a starling that is known for being very good at replicating sounds it hears. Jordan then played the spectrogram of the bird PNG to the starling who, after a bunch of chirping, eventually did recreate the sound. Which Jordan recorded and put back into the spectrogram. So basically he used a bird as a data transfer system. Crazy stuff!

As one commenter on the video wrote, “Can you run DOOM... on a bird?” You can run it on crabs it turns out.

There’s A Guy On TikTok Who Walks Around Really Fast

@kitsunefrenzy

Some Stray Links

• “Former Moderator Sues Chaturbate for 'Psychological Trauma'“

• “Rep. Ro Khanna backs Gen Z progressive Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois congressional race”

• “How Much Do Podcasters Really Earn? One Star Pulls Back the Curtain.”

P.S. here’s a man attempting the impossible.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***