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It looks like the Tea app has been pulled from the Apple store. The linked article has a strong bias supporting the existance of this app, but was it a good idea to have this app?
This app is/was, if you ask someone in the blue tribe about it, a safety app to keep women safe. If you ask someone in the red tribe about the app, they will say that men were not allowed to use the app, that the app was used to spread slander about men which the men were not allowed to see, much less respond to (often times female friends of a guy being slandered would let him know what’s going on).
As a lot of readers here probably know, earlier this summer, pictures of some Tea app users were leaked online causing those pictures to be widely shared, including in a torrent file. Someone even briefly had a web app up where people could rate pictures of Tea app users. The blue tribe thought it was a violation of privacy to do that; the red tribe responded by saying that the entire purpose of the Tea app was to violate the privacy of men.
The app was only available in the US; while it was arguably legal there, they didn’t even try to make it available in Europe, where it probably would not had been legal because Europe has much stronger data privacy laws than the US.
For myself, having had a close friend who was slandered in a similar Facebook group, I can not be neutral about this app being pulled from the Apple store: It harmed a lot of men, innocent men in many cases, and the world, in my opinion, is a better place when we don’t let men be slandered this way.
When thinking about this issues, I always try to find some old time equivalent and how would it go. For instance in the past would it be legal to make an advertisement in local news that next Tuesday there will be a meeting in a local club where anybody can discuss John Smith on the photo? Then you will have 20 people attending, drinking beer and talking shit about John. Is this something that you would consider as libel and prosecute local newspaper who printed such an advert? What if the advert was just printed paper that some person threw into mailboxes of the neighborhood? Is it some sort of punishable activity?
Now I understand that there is a difference in scale between digital and paper media, but I am still quite perplexed how quickly people bow to authoritarian powers if it is related to internet. For instance privacy of correspondence is a human right under article 12 of UN declaration of human rights. But apparently email and chat communication is arbitrarily not part of it. The same here - talking shit about somebody with friends in a pub is absolutely something that is normal human experience for millennia. But suddenly talking shit on the internet is some sort of punishable evil?
There is something that rubs me the wrong way, mostly that normalizing these heavy handed approaches may quickly turn from digital world to meat world.
The right to privacy of correspondence (article 12 UNHDR, article 8 ECHR, 4th amendment US Constitution) is a right against third-party snoopers including the government - not a right against the recipient forwarding the correspondence without permission. (Some countries protect confidential correspondence from unauthorised forwarding in specific, limited circumstances, but it was never the right protected by human rights codes)
Even in that sense, it has largely been lost, but I don't think that is because internet, I think it is because statists said "But muh terrorism" after 9-11 and normies didn't realise what they were giving up.
Seeing how badly most of EU wants to pass Chat Control, that right is deeply unpopular with the elites and soon to be abolished.
Your conversation isn't private when it's being automatically analysed for 'CSAM' by a complex technological system that's probably also soon going to do sentiment analysis and checking for disinformation.
How is text CSAM a big deal I'm never going to understand but then, I don't have to.
Such shitheads. If the wanted to protect kids, they could just mandate that children must use chat-controlled apps, and anyone else is free to use something else. But of course, it's about narrative control, not protecting children.
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