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>> How is Tea even legal? Isn't this just a legal libel timebomb waiting to happen? By this logic: I suppose glassdoor, yelp, or Google reviews aren't legal ei

>> How is Tea even legal? Isn't this just a legal libel timebomb waiting to happen? By this logic: I suppose glassdoor, yelp, or Google reviews aren't legal either? What about identity verification as part of any employment offer?

AndroTux 1y ago
The difference is, on these platforms you're rating legal entities. On Tea, you're rating, or rather sharing personal information about, an individual. Where I come from, sharing personal data of someone without their consent is not allowed.
- bluescrn 1y ago
  > On Tea, you're rating, or rather sharing personal information about, an individual. Or in this case, sharing personal information about yourself...
  - Bilal_io 1y ago
    No, they'd be sharing the man's photo, name and phone number if I am not mistaken, and obviously without his consent.
- voxic11 1y ago
  I think its a mostly US based app, in the US sharing your opinion about other people is protected speech.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Sharing your opinion is protected speech, by lying is not always protected speech, particularly if done with the intent to financially hurt someone.
    - gitremote 1y ago
      Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying and intending to hurt men, because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women?
      - emseetech 1y ago
        I do. Not as an indictment of women but an indictment of social apps. Apps like this are way too hard to moderate, manage and verify. They quickly get swarmed by bad actors and misused. Again, not because women don't have genuine safety concerns in the dating world but because apps are not a viable way to manage those concerns. Some social problems just don't have technological solutions.
        gitremote 1y ago
        Like online reviews, if 10 women reported that the same man was violent, would you see it as 10 data points or 0 data points that say nothing?
        emseetech 1y ago
        You know the answer to that is zero. There is no viable system a company, let alone a small unfunded startup, could use to verify the identity of the reporters let alone guarantee the trustworthiness of the account. Those ten reports could be made by one person. That one person might not even know the person they're accusing. That one person might be a man. That one person might be a bot. You'd have to ignore the last three decades of online identity, trolling and social media pitfalls to not recognize that. And please don't compare reviewing a can opener on Amazon to accusing someone anonymously of a heinous crime on an app built by one person. But I'm not sure I'm going to convince you with words so I'll suggest this: Go and build this app. Build it, see what happens. Nobody else has been able to crack this but maybe you can.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        1y ago
  - hyperliner 1y ago
    Not if it’s libel or slander, both which are generically defamation.
    - gitremote 1y ago
      It's not defamation if it's true. Why do you think women warning other women about rapey and stalker men are mostly lies? Even if it's only 5% of men, wouldn't the discussion focus on that dangerous 5% over persecuting the innocent 95%, as a matter of self-preservation?
      - GoatInGrey 1y ago
        An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. While it's controversial for men to be concerned about women as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. I still maintain my pet theory that this is a downstream effect of the normalization of paranoia around pedophiles that began hitting the mainstream in the '80s. The modern world is exceptionally safe, yet to the average person, it feels exceptionally dangerous. ...While I've got the hood up, I'll continue soapboxing. I've started seeing rare instances such as a young woman walking around a corner and there is a man rounding the same corner, surprising her by mistake, and the woman starts crying or breathing in a panicked way, unable to regulate herself for several minutes. It's not always walking around the corner at the same time, but there's a common pattern of being surprised by a man just going about his day and experiencing a severe fear response to that interaction. When I look at a lot of cultural related issues today, beyond just gender, I see many signs of pervasive psychological issues. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm very confident that the root cause is more complicated than something you can describe in a single sentence.
        gitremote 1y ago
        > An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. The same hypothetical 5% can inflict harm to multiple women, that's why multiple women and girls complained about Epstein and Trump.
  - perihelions 1y ago
    But sharing *facts* about other people is potentially defamatory speech (in the American context). There's a not-at-all small nuance here: when you make concrete allegations about your personal experiences, you're not sharing an opinion—not sharing your subjective reaction to publicly-known information—rather you're introducing novel facts, provable objective facts, into the discussion—your version of those facts. And that comes with genuine legal risks. A remarkable fact that's stayed with me: Ken White (@popehat) once said that in his defamation law practice, his largest category of consultations was with clients who'd said negative things about a past romantic partner, who then threatened to sue. I believe his point was those negative things were true most of the time, but difficult to prove, or defend.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      > But sharing facts about other people is potentially defamatory speech Yes, and? The service is protected in the US by Section 230, and Tea doesn't operate anywhere else currently. Individual users who use it defame are, in principal, subject to defamation liability, but in the US (and, again, that’s the only jurisdiction currently relevant), the burden to proving that the description was both false and at least negligently made (as well as the other elements of the tort) falls on the plaintiff (it is often said that “truth is an absolute defense”, but that’s misleading—falsity and fault are both elements of the prima facie case the plaintiff must establish.) Sure, in a jurisdiction with strict liability for libel and where truth is actually a defense, and/or where the platform itself, being a deep pockets target, was exposed, Tea would be a more precarious business. But that’s not where it operates.
      - perihelions 1y ago
        That's all true. I wasn't clear on the context of this thread, whether we were talking about the users or the platform.
      - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        The most obvious legal claim at the moment is that Tea was negligent about its security. I suspect that's going to be more of a problem for Tea than hypothetical individual defamation cases. Although having said that, how can you sue someone for defamation if you never find out you're being defamed? Any woman can say "Don't date [name], he's a bad person" and the victim will never know. Unless he asks a female friend for a social credit check, all [name] will see is a shrinking pool of opportunities.
  - mjbroe02 1y ago
    That doesn't apply when you publish information for broad consumption. Then it becomes libel. People need to realize that posting on a site where you can reasonably expect that your words may be consumed by the masses makes you a publisher. That comes with responsibilities and is not protected the same way as an individual's personal speech.
  - DocTomoe 1y ago
    So all I need to do to mark another guy (who might be, for example, competing for a job I want, or a certain woman's attention) as a rapist on a platform that's used by people in the location this guy lives in in the US is a (fake) female driver's license, a photo of the guy in question, and a name? coolcoolcool. I'm sure that never ever gets abused horrifically.
- gitremote 1y ago
  What was leaked was women's personal data, like driver's licenses. What they shared with each other was their experiences with men who sexually assaulted them or stalked them and their names, not the men's personal data. Men's driver licenses were not distributed online. Only women's driver licenses were distributed online.
  - quietbritishjim 1y ago
    I'm not familiar with this app, but surely those accusations of sexual assault are only useful to other users of the men are sufficiently well identified?
    - gitremote 1y ago
      Name and photo.
      - 9dev 1y ago
        So… Personal data?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
    The article says that what gets shared with the app is a picture of the man, and it's not just "those who sexually assaulted them or stalked them" but anyone they want feedback about. I assume the app then runs facial recognition. This may be legal in the US, but not under GDPR. Pictures of faces are biometric data (explicitly listed as such), which falls under additional restrictions beyond personally identifiable information. A drivers license with the picture blacked out would be less sensitive than the picture itself!
    - 9dev 1y ago
      > This may be legal in the US, but not under GDPR. This whole story is an amazing example of why the GDPR is correct about this, IMHO.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Where I come from, sharing personal data of someone without their consent is not allowed. Where you come from, people arent allowed to share their own experiences interacting with third parties without the third parties consent? Sounds pretty oppressive, but there are absolutely many jurisdictions where that is not the case.
  - ioasuncvinvaer 1y ago
    They post images of the men in question without consent.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      Unless they are intimate images (in which case revenge porn laws are likely to apply), copyrightable images for which someone other than the poster is the creator posted without the copyright holder’s permission (in which case copyright applies), or being used for commercial promotion or to suggest endorsement (in which case, depending on which states law applies, state law right of personality/publicity, especially if the subject is a celebrity, might apply), that's generally legal in the US.
      - ohdeargodno 1y ago
        > that's generally legal in the US. Cool, I'm sure Tea is only available to report things about United States citiz... nevermind. It runs afoul of about a dozen european rights to privacy, imagery and consent laws. And that's just by posting pictures ! Libel and slander are a bunch of others, right to a response is also another... the list is long. It is, once again, yet another dudebro trying to skirt legality.
        dragonwriter 1y ago
        > It runs afoul of about a dozen european rights to privacy, imagery and consent laws The EU is welcome to try to enforce its local laws on the US operations of a US business open only to US users, but I don’t think its going to have much success.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Also on those platforms you can see if people are trash talking you even if you don’t have a procedure to face your accuser. Even the open platforms creep me out. I don’t like seeing unverified accounts of crime in Nextdoor, I think if you see some crime you go to the police. I had a series of in person interactions with a woman which seemed creepy in retrospect, her Nextdoor was full of creepy stuff including screenshots of creepy online interactions. At least this gives everyone clear evidence they should keep away.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  > Where I come from …is clearly not the US, which has probably the most expansive understanding of “freedom of speech” in the world.
  - chneu 1y ago
    lol no it doesn't. american freedom is a bit of a joke but it's par for the course in the USA to make shit up and then defend it. The USA doesn't even rank in the top 15 on the human freedom index. Most freedom indices don't even put the USA in the top 20. A few don't even put the USA in the top 30.
    - throwaway48476 1y ago
      In my personal and equally arbitrary freedom index north korea is #1.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      I neither agree nor disagree with the specific point about the US but all those indexes are silly, pointless and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Also they have very little to do with “measuring” freedom of speech anyway.
  - 9dev 1y ago
    So totally free, unless you criticise the empero… err, Trump or the government, of course. Or if you're against Israeli settlements. Or in favour of humane treatment of the People of Palestine. Or have information on the customers of Jeffrey Epstein. Or…
    - mvdtnz 1y ago
      Well I'm not American but I feel like all I have read for the last 8 months has been American organisations and American people criticising Trump, the US government and Israel. I am not aware of penalties for these orgs or people, do you have examples?
      - 1y ago
fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
> By this logic: I suppose glassdoor, yelp, or Google reviews aren't legal either? Imagining a future where I have to pay Tea to promote and astroturf my profile or they lower my rating, and pay bot farms to post glowing reviews
- fragmede 1y ago
  In this future that you want me to imagine, do you imagine, that I'm imagining that I am poor or I am rich? Because oh man, I didn't have much luck at the lottery or at blackjack or craps or startups or crypto, but I'm sure, this time, AI is gonna help me strike it rich!
Beijinger 1y ago
I have not used the app nor read much about it but this guys talk about it: https://youtu.be/WjfpryoQ0Mk https://youtu.be/WjfpryoQ0Mk Yes, as far as I understand, you upload pictures of men, either taken in the wild or from dating sites (Tinder) against their will. I am pretty sure that this would be illegal in some jurisdictions. Especially EU.
ajuc 1y ago
Companies aren't people (despite lots of people pretending they are).

AndroTux 1y ago

The difference is, on these platforms you're rating legal entities. On Tea, you're rating, or rather sharing personal information about, an individual. Where I come from, sharing personal data of someone without their consent is not allowed.

bluescrn 1y ago
> On Tea, you're rating, or rather sharing personal information about, an individual. Or in this case, sharing personal information about yourself...
- Bilal_io 1y ago
  No, they'd be sharing the man's photo, name and phone number if I am not mistaken, and obviously without his consent.
voxic11 1y ago
I think its a mostly US based app, in the US sharing your opinion about other people is protected speech.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Sharing your opinion is protected speech, by lying is not always protected speech, particularly if done with the intent to financially hurt someone.
  - gitremote 1y ago
    Do you think a women's dating safety app is mainly about women lying and intending to hurt men, because it's rare for men to stalk or sexually assault women?
    - emseetech 1y ago
      I do. Not as an indictment of women but an indictment of social apps. Apps like this are way too hard to moderate, manage and verify. They quickly get swarmed by bad actors and misused. Again, not because women don't have genuine safety concerns in the dating world but because apps are not a viable way to manage those concerns. Some social problems just don't have technological solutions.
      - gitremote 1y ago
        Like online reviews, if 10 women reported that the same man was violent, would you see it as 10 data points or 0 data points that say nothing?
        emseetech 1y ago
        You know the answer to that is zero. There is no viable system a company, let alone a small unfunded startup, could use to verify the identity of the reporters let alone guarantee the trustworthiness of the account. Those ten reports could be made by one person. That one person might not even know the person they're accusing. That one person might be a man. That one person might be a bot. You'd have to ignore the last three decades of online identity, trolling and social media pitfalls to not recognize that. And please don't compare reviewing a can opener on Amazon to accusing someone anonymously of a heinous crime on an app built by one person. But I'm not sure I'm going to convince you with words so I'll suggest this: Go and build this app. Build it, see what happens. Nobody else has been able to crack this but maybe you can.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        1y ago
- hyperliner 1y ago
  Not if it’s libel or slander, both which are generically defamation.
  - gitremote 1y ago
    It's not defamation if it's true. Why do you think women warning other women about rapey and stalker men are mostly lies? Even if it's only 5% of men, wouldn't the discussion focus on that dangerous 5% over persecuting the innocent 95%, as a matter of self-preservation?
    - GoatInGrey 1y ago
      An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. While it's controversial for men to be concerned about women as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. I still maintain my pet theory that this is a downstream effect of the normalization of paranoia around pedophiles that began hitting the mainstream in the '80s. The modern world is exceptionally safe, yet to the average person, it feels exceptionally dangerous. ...While I've got the hood up, I'll continue soapboxing. I've started seeing rare instances such as a young woman walking around a corner and there is a man rounding the same corner, surprising her by mistake, and the woman starts crying or breathing in a panicked way, unable to regulate herself for several minutes. It's not always walking around the corner at the same time, but there's a common pattern of being surprised by a man just going about his day and experiencing a severe fear response to that interaction. When I look at a lot of cultural related issues today, beyond just gender, I see many signs of pervasive psychological issues. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm very confident that the root cause is more complicated than something you can describe in a single sentence.
      - gitremote 1y ago
        > An irony in this conversation is how normalized it is for women to be concerned about men as a demographic when it's only a small minority that inflict harm. The same hypothetical 5% can inflict harm to multiple women, that's why multiple women and girls complained about Epstein and Trump.
- perihelions 1y ago
  But sharing *facts* about other people is potentially defamatory speech (in the American context). There's a not-at-all small nuance here: when you make concrete allegations about your personal experiences, you're not sharing an opinion—not sharing your subjective reaction to publicly-known information—rather you're introducing novel facts, provable objective facts, into the discussion—your version of those facts. And that comes with genuine legal risks. A remarkable fact that's stayed with me: Ken White (@popehat) once said that in his defamation law practice, his largest category of consultations was with clients who'd said negative things about a past romantic partner, who then threatened to sue. I believe his point was those negative things were true most of the time, but difficult to prove, or defend.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > But sharing facts about other people is potentially defamatory speech Yes, and? The service is protected in the US by Section 230, and Tea doesn't operate anywhere else currently. Individual users who use it defame are, in principal, subject to defamation liability, but in the US (and, again, that’s the only jurisdiction currently relevant), the burden to proving that the description was both false and at least negligently made (as well as the other elements of the tort) falls on the plaintiff (it is often said that “truth is an absolute defense”, but that’s misleading—falsity and fault are both elements of the prima facie case the plaintiff must establish.) Sure, in a jurisdiction with strict liability for libel and where truth is actually a defense, and/or where the platform itself, being a deep pockets target, was exposed, Tea would be a more precarious business. But that’s not where it operates.
    - perihelions 1y ago
      That's all true. I wasn't clear on the context of this thread, whether we were talking about the users or the platform.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      The most obvious legal claim at the moment is that Tea was negligent about its security. I suspect that's going to be more of a problem for Tea than hypothetical individual defamation cases. Although having said that, how can you sue someone for defamation if you never find out you're being defamed? Any woman can say "Don't date [name], he's a bad person" and the victim will never know. Unless he asks a female friend for a social credit check, all [name] will see is a shrinking pool of opportunities.
- mjbroe02 1y ago
  That doesn't apply when you publish information for broad consumption. Then it becomes libel. People need to realize that posting on a site where you can reasonably expect that your words may be consumed by the masses makes you a publisher. That comes with responsibilities and is not protected the same way as an individual's personal speech.
- DocTomoe 1y ago
  So all I need to do to mark another guy (who might be, for example, competing for a job I want, or a certain woman's attention) as a rapist on a platform that's used by people in the location this guy lives in in the US is a (fake) female driver's license, a photo of the guy in question, and a name? coolcoolcool. I'm sure that never ever gets abused horrifically.
gitremote 1y ago
What was leaked was women's personal data, like driver's licenses. What they shared with each other was their experiences with men who sexually assaulted them or stalked them and their names, not the men's personal data. Men's driver licenses were not distributed online. Only women's driver licenses were distributed online.
- quietbritishjim 1y ago
  I'm not familiar with this app, but surely those accusations of sexual assault are only useful to other users of the men are sufficiently well identified?
  - gitremote 1y ago
    Name and photo.
    - 9dev 1y ago
      So… Personal data?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
  The article says that what gets shared with the app is a picture of the man, and it's not just "those who sexually assaulted them or stalked them" but anyone they want feedback about. I assume the app then runs facial recognition. This may be legal in the US, but not under GDPR. Pictures of faces are biometric data (explicitly listed as such), which falls under additional restrictions beyond personally identifiable information. A drivers license with the picture blacked out would be less sensitive than the picture itself!
  - 9dev 1y ago
    > This may be legal in the US, but not under GDPR. This whole story is an amazing example of why the GDPR is correct about this, IMHO.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 1y ago
> Where I come from, sharing personal data of someone without their consent is not allowed. Where you come from, people arent allowed to share their own experiences interacting with third parties without the third parties consent? Sounds pretty oppressive, but there are absolutely many jurisdictions where that is not the case.
- ioasuncvinvaer 1y ago
  They post images of the men in question without consent.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    Unless they are intimate images (in which case revenge porn laws are likely to apply), copyrightable images for which someone other than the poster is the creator posted without the copyright holder’s permission (in which case copyright applies), or being used for commercial promotion or to suggest endorsement (in which case, depending on which states law applies, state law right of personality/publicity, especially if the subject is a celebrity, might apply), that's generally legal in the US.
    - ohdeargodno 1y ago
      > that's generally legal in the US. Cool, I'm sure Tea is only available to report things about United States citiz... nevermind. It runs afoul of about a dozen european rights to privacy, imagery and consent laws. And that's just by posting pictures ! Libel and slander are a bunch of others, right to a response is also another... the list is long. It is, once again, yet another dudebro trying to skirt legality.
      - dragonwriter 1y ago
        > It runs afoul of about a dozen european rights to privacy, imagery and consent laws The EU is welcome to try to enforce its local laws on the US operations of a US business open only to US users, but I don’t think its going to have much success.
PaulHoule 1y ago
Also on those platforms you can see if people are trash talking you even if you don’t have a procedure to face your accuser. Even the open platforms creep me out. I don’t like seeing unverified accounts of crime in Nextdoor, I think if you see some crime you go to the police. I had a series of in person interactions with a woman which seemed creepy in retrospect, her Nextdoor was full of creepy stuff including screenshots of creepy online interactions. At least this gives everyone clear evidence they should keep away.
School-Cotton 1y ago
> Where I come from …is clearly not the US, which has probably the most expansive understanding of “freedom of speech” in the world.
- chneu 1y ago
  lol no it doesn't. american freedom is a bit of a joke but it's par for the course in the USA to make shit up and then defend it. The USA doesn't even rank in the top 15 on the human freedom index. Most freedom indices don't even put the USA in the top 20. A few don't even put the USA in the top 30.
  - throwaway48476 1y ago
    In my personal and equally arbitrary freedom index north korea is #1.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    I neither agree nor disagree with the specific point about the US but all those indexes are silly, pointless and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Also they have very little to do with “measuring” freedom of speech anyway.
- 9dev 1y ago
  So totally free, unless you criticise the empero… err, Trump or the government, of course. Or if you're against Israeli settlements. Or in favour of humane treatment of the People of Palestine. Or have information on the customers of Jeffrey Epstein. Or…
  - mvdtnz 1y ago
    Well I'm not American but I feel like all I have read for the last 8 months has been American organisations and American people criticising Trump, the US government and Israel. I am not aware of penalties for these orgs or people, do you have examples?
    - 1y ago

fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago

> By this logic: I suppose glassdoor, yelp, or Google reviews aren't legal either? Imagining a future where I have to pay Tea to promote and astroturf my profile or they lower my rating, and pay bot farms to post glowing reviews

fragmede 1y ago
In this future that you want me to imagine, do you imagine, that I'm imagining that I am poor or I am rich? Because oh man, I didn't have much luck at the lottery or at blackjack or craps or startups or crypto, but I'm sure, this time, AI is gonna help me strike it rich!

Beijinger 1y ago

I have not used the app nor read much about it but this guys talk about it: https://youtu.be/WjfpryoQ0Mk https://youtu.be/WjfpryoQ0Mk Yes, as far as I understand, you upload pictures of men, either taken in the wild or from dating sites (Tinder) against their will. I am pretty sure that this would be illegal in some jurisdictions. Especially EU.

ajuc 1y ago

Companies aren't people (despite lots of people pretending they are).