An app recently had a huge data breach — so why have more than 900,000 women joined it in the past few days?

The Tea app is advertised as “dating safety tools that protect women,” offering female users the ability to scope out men they’re talking to before meeting them in person or committing to a relationship. In the app, women keep each other informed by anonymously giving “red” or “green” flags  or commenting on their personal experiences with men that users post.

It’s not hard to imagine how the app could be abused by its users. The ability to anonymously “review” other people is helpful in encouraging women to speak out about their experiences but detrimental in keeping the app safe for nonusers. Because the app is exclusive to women, with users required to submit photo identification, the men who are posted don’t have the ability to defend themselves, making Tea a space that can easily transform into online bullying. 

Women on the app were also put at risk in a recent data breach, resulting in around 13,000 images of users being posted to the right-wing message board 4Chan.

Despite the app’s evident safety flaws, it’s easy to see why there’s a long virtual queue of women waiting to join it. Tea calls itself a “sisterhood,” and a testimonial on its homepage says that being part of the app is like “having a trusted friend who has all the juicy details.” But if we need an app to be our trusted friend, we have strayed too far off the path of being there for each other as women.

Tea isn’t the first app to provide a false sense of safety and community to women. On TikTok, trends that involve users sharing personal details are popular among young people, especially those who are willing to share experiences with eating disorders or sexual assault in the hopes of finding solidarity with other women. This may sound like a coincidental benefit of the app’s broad reach, but it’s both intentional and dangerous — TikTok’s personalized algorithm makes users feel that they’re in a small, like-minded community, instead of one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Social media users are more likely to focus on the benefits of online self-disclosure than the risks; young women may overlook privacy concerns because they focus on the benefit of speaking to other women about their experiences.

While online communities may give the illusion of privacy, a digital footprint is impossible to erase. For now, there is no safe way to publicly warn a group of women online about your toxic ex. What we can do, however, is look out for the women in our real lives. 

Instead of relying on online opportunities to share our experiences, we need to create in-person ones. It’s not just about checking in on your close female friends; it starts with expanding our internal concept of who is a part of our lives — the answer is a lot more women than we think. It’s the women who live on our floor, the women in our lectures and the women we see outside on a Friday night. If we start seeking out chances in our daily lives to make other women safe, it can have a real impact on women’s safety as a whole. 

This requires paying attention to the women around us. When we pay attention, we can notice that the girl who usually sits next to us in class is missing. We can notice the girl we just passed on Massachusetts Avenue looking scared to be walking alone. We can notice the girl who lives next door hanging out with a guy we know is unsafe. 

This effort is reciprocal; when we reach out to other women, whether it be to ask if they need support or to ask for it ourselves, it can make other women more comfortable to reach out to us. 

Beyond physical safety, in-person communities can make us feel emotionally connected, too. Online communities, especially those with anonymous users, take away the sense of vulnerability needed to build trust. While the internet may be a less intimidating space to share your experiences, it also doesn’t help us form sustainable or intimate connections. The Tea app’s safety scare has made it clear that we can’t outsource female sisterhood to an app — but the fulfillment we gain from in-person connections is why we shouldn’t even try to.

Being on a college campus is a community, if we let it be. If the Tea app has done any good, I hope it shows that women are ready to protect each other if given the opportunity — we just have to realize the opportunity isn’t in an app, but in every woman around us.

Nora Harr is a second-year English and computer science combined major. She can be reached at harr.n@northeastern.edu.

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