Reading these incredible comments has revealed a large piece of what was named as the reason for lemm.ee shutting down.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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I can't open the article, but I think I read that this was hosted on an unprotected bucket. Assuming that's correct I wouldn't say this was a breach. A better headline would be "Women dating safety app 'Tea' exposed women's PII".
To be 100% clear, I'm not excusing the hackers. I don't believe it's morally correct to publicize something because it is exposed. For folks curious about that you can look into how to ethically disclose vulnerabilities. I still view this as doxxing. I still believe what the hackers did should be a criminal offense, it's just that I also believe the app holds a ton of the blame as well. How can you proclaim to be about keeping women safe while putting them at risk? That should be punished as well.
Like if the storage facility you trusted to hold your stuff never had locks on the doors, shouldn't they take a lot of the blame as well as the thief who found out a door was unlocked?
The bigger problem is trying to get the mainstream that would read an article like that to understand the technical difference between hacking and accessing unsecured data.
The term has had so many definitions its not really meaningful.
To a normie, turning the pull tab on a beverage can around so that it holds a straw is a "hack."
One of the definitions of hacking is illegally gaining access to a computer system. It doesn't need to involve any sort of exploit. Stealing from an unlocked home is still stealing. Gaining access to a system by phishing is still hacking. Leaking data that is technically publicly accessible that isn't meant to be publicly accessible is still hacking.
Not that I suspect anything good from 4chan but the proper thing to do would be to disclose to Tea that their data is public and allow them to fix the problem. The ethics of vulnerability disclosure still apply when the vulnerability is "hey you literally didn't secure this at all."
illegally gaining access to a computer system
This is also The legal Definition applied in Germany (with the only difference being, that in Germany it is "gaining access to a system not meant to be accessed). The problem with this is, that everyone who finds security breaches is at threat to be punished for it, even if they ethically disclose it. There have been various cases of ethical hackers receiving fines for disclosing security vulnerabilities.
Same in America. Someone who found a government website had SSNs just sitting in the HTML was almost prosecuted for viewing the raw HTML after ethically disclosing it.
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