STUPID-2026-0038

Vibe-coded Tea app leaked 72,000 IDs and selfies plus 1.1M private messages from an unsecured bucket

10.0critical
July 25, 2025Source checked

Why 10/10

72,000 ID photos and selfies plus 1.1M private messages leaked and reached 4chan. Exposure of this data cannot be undone.

Scope
4/4
Many organisations or the public: a flaw in a widely used product, mass exposure, a large outage
Recoverability
3/3
Permanently lost or irreversible, including data that was exposed
Did it happen
2/2
Happened in real use
Beyond the user
1/1
Production systems, customers or third parties, or credentials and sensitive personal data

The score is the sum of these four factors. How each factor is scored · scored 2026-10-29

  1. Instruction given

    Store user verification photos and messages for a women's dating-safety app.

  2. Expected behavior

    Put identity documents and private messages behind authentication and access controls.

  3. Actual behavior

    Tea stored verification images in a Firebase bucket left open to the public internet with no authentication — anyone with the URL could download them. Poor authorization also exposed private messages.

  4. Damage

    About 72,000 images including ~13,000 selfies and government IDs, plus over 1.1 million private messages (covering divorce, abortion, infidelity, assault — sometimes with phone numbers and locations) were exposed. The data reached 4chan; leaks of this kind are irreversible.

Full write-up

Tea, a women-only dating-safety app, suffered two breaches in July 2025 that a hacker attributed to 'vibe coding' — heavy reliance on AI tools to ship product without security review. Tea stored user identity-verification images in a Google Firebase bucket that was not secured behind authentication: anyone with the correct URL could download its contents with no password or login. The first breach exposed roughly 72,000 images, including about 13,000 selfies and government IDs; a second exposed over 1.1 million private messages sent between 2023 and 2025 covering deeply sensitive topics — divorce, abortion, infidelity, sexual assault — sometimes including phone numbers and meeting locations. The data circulated on 4chan. Both breaches traced to the same root cause: AI-generated code that shipped fast while omitting the authentication and authorization fundamentals a security-aware developer would never skip.

Classification

Agent
Unknown agent
Failure mode
Security Vulnerability
Root cause
Instruction Misunderstanding
Domain
Backend
MIT AI Risk Repository (our mapping)
2.2 AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks · 2.1 Compromise of privacy by leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information taxonomy
Source
News Report

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Cite this record
StupidLLM. "STUPID-2026-0038: Vibe-coded Tea app leaked 72,000 IDs and selfies plus 1.1M private messages from an unsecured bucket." AI Agent Incident Database, 2026. https://www.stupidllm.com/incident/STUPID-2026-0038/ (accessed 2026-10-29). CC BY 4.0.

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