Tea App: Safety, Surveillance and Ethical Concerns on College Campuses
Dating apps have reshaped how people meet, and new platforms are continually shifting the boundaries of safety, privacy and accountability. One of the latest entrants, Tea, markets itself as a surveillance-focused tool intended to help women vet prospective dates by aggregating background information—allegedly including criminal-record searches—and enabling users to flag individuals on the platform.
Tea’s rise, which gained momentum in July after the app was linked to major data leaks, has extended into college communities, where students at Minnesota State University have used the service to identify and comment on male students. The app requires users to upload a photo to verify they are women and then allows them to add men to a database with a picture, first name and age, and to mark profiles with red or green flags and participate in comment threads.
Proponents say the app offers a way for women to share warnings and reduce risk when meeting new people. But the platform’s design and rapid scale have prompted concerns from academics and affected individuals alike.
“Having a resource that can help give you some background information or some red flags, I think that’s important,” said Michigan State University professor Jen Tiernan. “The issue … when it moves to an online platform where you have potentially millions of people on it, it can get kind of out of control very easily.”
Tiernan and fellow MSU communications professor Heather McIntosh, both instructors in Social Media and Society, say the problems are both practical and ethical. They question what safeguards the app’s creators implemented, how information was collected and verified, and what protections exist for people who may be wrongly characterized on the platform.
“You have to think about the people who are being potentially defamed on this app too and talked about. It’s such a mess,” Tiernan said. McIntosh added that backlash was unsurprising, noting the app was removed from Apple’s App Store last month: “The sense of evaluating people in an online space has been there for a long time, and the backlash has been there for a long time.”
The app’s founder, Sean Cook, reportedly created Tea in 2023 after his mother experienced troubling incidents while using mainstream dating services. McIntosh acknowledged the intent behind Tea but said the execution falls short: “I think their intentions were good, but I think the execution didn’t work. I wish there were another way to make online dating safer for everyone, but we would also need to step back and think about how can we make online safer for everyone?”
Academics point out that Tea is part of a broader pattern of niche apps attempting to address safety or accountability in dating—examples include Plum, a competitor that asks users to rate matches on character-based components using a numerical system. Still, critics argue these solutions often reproduce familiar problems from earlier platforms without fundamentally improving verification, moderation or due process.
Tiernan emphasized a longer-term perspective: while social platforms have produced many benefits, they can also displace face-to-face community ties that foster trust and relationships. “When it replaces that in-person community … I think you lose that realistic, that human connection that you can’t really 100% replicate online,” she said.
