#scrutiny #ChatGPT #exchange #linked #users #mental #health #crisis
Sydney — Humans beat generative AI models made by Google and OpenAI at a top international mathematics competition, but the programs reached gold-level scores for the first time, and the rate at which they are improving may be cause for some human introspection.
Neither of the AI models scored full marks — unlike five young people at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a prestigious annual competition where participants must be under 20 years old.
Google said Monday that an advanced version of its Gemini chatbot had solved five out of the six math problems set at the IMO, held in Australia’s Queensland this month.
“We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much-desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points – a gold medal score,” the U.S. tech giant cited IMO president Gregor Dolinar as saying. “Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise and most of them easy to follow.”
Around 10% of human contestants won gold-level medals, and five received perfect scores of 42 points.
U.S. ChatGPT maker OpenAI said its experimental reasoning model had also scored a gold-level 35 points on the test.
The result “achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI” at “the world’s most prestigious math competition,” OpenAI researcher Alexander Wei said in a social media post.
“We evaluated our models on the 2025 IMO problems under the same rules as human contestants,” he said. “For each problem, three former IMO medalists independently graded the model’s submitted proof.”
Google achieved a silver-medal score at last year’s IMO in the city of Bath, in southwest England, solving four of the six problems.
That took two to three days of computation — far longer than this year, when its Gemini model solved the problems within the 4.5-hour time limit, it said.
The IMO said tech companies had “privately tested closed-source AI models on this year’s problems,” the same ones faced by 641 competing students from 112 countries.
“It is very exciting to see progress in the mathematical capabilities of AI models,” said IMO president Dolinar.
Contest organizers could not verify how much computing power had been used by the AI models or whether there had been human involvement, he noted.
In an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes earlier this year, one of Google’s leading AI researchers predicted that within just five to 10 years, computers would be made that have human-level cognitive abilities — a landmark known as “artificial general intelligence.”
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis predicted that AI technology was on track to understand the world in nuanced ways, and to not only solve important problems, but even to develop a sense of imagination, within a decade, thanks to an increase in investment.
“It’s moving incredibly fast,” Hassabis said. “I think we are on some kind of exponential curve of improvement. Of course, the success of the field in the last few years has attracted even more attention, more resources, more talent. So that’s adding to the, to this exponential progress.”
#Humans #triumph #annual #math #Olympiad #machines #catching
The Trump administration on Wednesday unveiled an AI Action Plan aimed at maintaining U.S. dominance in the rapidly emerging artificial intelligence field. The initiative is part of an ongoing effort the White House began earlier this year with an executive order removing AI guardrails imposed by the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump spoke about the new plan during a keynote address at an AI summit in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, after which he signed executive orders to help fast-track AI development.
“Around the globe, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday. “I find that too, ‘artificial’ — I can’t stand it. I don’t even like the name. I don’t like anything that’s artificial, so could we straighten that out, please? We should change the name. I actually mean that. I don’t like the name artificial anything. Because it’s not artificial, it’s genius. It’s pure genius.”
Mr. Trump said AI has the potential to “transform every type of endeavor and domain of human knowledge, from medicine to manufacturing to warfare and national defense.”
“Whether we like it or not, we’re suddenly engaged in a fast-paced competition to build and define this groundbreaking technology that will determine so much about the future of civilization itself,” he said.
The Trump administration’s plan, which includes more than 90 federal policy actions, broadly will:
- Support the buildout of data centers, semiconductor fabrication plants and the nation’s electric grid;
- Create rules for government contractors in an attempt to eliminate “ideological bias” in chatbots;
- Withhold funding from states that have “burdensome” AI regulations;
- Compel federal agencies to review their rules and repeal any that obstruct AI development;
- Establish a program to deliver AI export packages — including hardware, large language models, software, applications and standards — to U.S. allies.
Mr. Trump said “a lot of very brilliant people” tell him AI will dominate virtually every industry, although he said he doesn’t know if that’s true. The president said AI brings the possibility of peril, as well as progress.
“The daunting power of AI is really, it’s not going to be a reason for retreat from this new frontier,” Mr. Trump said. “On the contrary, it is the more reason we must ensure it is pioneered first and best.”
AI is like a “beautiful baby that’s born,” he said of the technology’s current state.
“We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive,” the president said. That means allowing some regulation, but also cutting red tape, he said.
The president thanked companies present at the summit for investing in data centers and other projects, saying they’ll create thousands of jobs.
The Wednesday announcement is co-hosted by the bipartisan Hill and Valley Forum and the All-In Podcast, a business and technology show hosted by four technology investors and entrepreneurs who include Mr. Trump’s AI and crypto czar David Sacks.
“The goal here is for the United States to win the AI race,” Sacks said during a press call with reporters Wednesday morning.
The plan is backed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and will be carried out over the next six months to a year, according to Michael Kratsios, policy director of the OSTP.
“This is a watershed day for Trump to lay out the AI vision and make sure the U.S. stays ahead of China despite all the trade deal turmoil,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in an email to CBS MoneyWatch.
What is the AI Action Plan?
The AI Action Plan focuses on accelerating AI innovation and building out AI infrastructure to ensure the U.S. leads in international “AI diplomacy,” according to Sacks, who laid out the plan’s major pillars during Wednesday’s call.
That includes expediting the construction of large-scale data centers, which house servers, networking gear and other technology used to power artificial intelligence.
Thousands of data centers are scattered around the U.S. Most are connected to the nation’s power grid and rely on massive amounts of electricity to operate. The proliferation of AI data centers has been cited as one of the drivers of burgeoning energy costs.
The number of data centers is only expected to grow as technology companies — including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and xAI — ramp up construction to meet the nation’s growing energy demand stemming from the emergence of AI.
In addition to investments in data centers, the new White House plan also focuses on “expediting and modernizing programs” for semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs, and updating the nation’s electric grid to support the enormous energy demands of AI supercomputing, Kratsios said.
Another focus will be on reining in what White House officials have called an “ideological bias” in chatbots. This is something Sacks, a former PayPal executive, has highlighted after a 2024 incident in which Google’s AI image generator created pictures of Black, Asian and Native American men when asked to show one of the countries Founding Fathers.
“We believe that AI systems should be free of ideological bias and not be designed to pursue socially engineered agendas,” Sacks said on Wednesday. “And so we have a number of proposals there on how to make sure that AI remains truth-seeking and trustworthy.”
To that end, Kratsios said the plan will update federal procurement guidelines to ensure the government only contracts with AI developers whose systems “allow free speech expression to flourish.”
The plan also seeks to maintain the U.S.’ edge in the global race for AI dominance as it competes with countries like China, which has moved quickly to expand its AI capabilities. A senior White House official said the report supports export controls to make sure “that our most advanced technology doesn’t get into the hands of [other] countries.”
As part of its efforts, the White House also seeks to remove what it refers to as “onerous regulation” that the Trump administration says is hindering AI innovation. The official added that the plan calls for the removal of diversity, equity and inclusion and climate funding requirements from the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act.
DEI regulations within the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act “burden the industry” and “slow down the delivery of critical projects,” they said.
#White #House #unveils #U.S #strategic #plan #Heres #includes
Uber said it’s starting a program to allow women passengers to pick female drivers or share a ride with other women, with pilots slated to begin in the next few weeks in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit.
In a Wednesday statement, Uber said that women customers will see an option called “women drivers” in the app. If the wait time for a woman driver is longer than they would like, they can pick another ride — presumably with a male driver — for a quicker pickup, the company said.
“Across the U.S., women riders and drivers have told us they want the option to be matched with other women on trips,” Uber said in its statement.
However, longer wait times could be an issue for women who want to get picked up by a female driver, given that Uber has said about 1 in 5 of its drivers are women. Customers can also pre-book rides with women drivers, the company said Wednesday.
“That is what we expect to learn more about during this pilot. Riders may experience longer wait times if women drivers are unavailable or further away. If so, they can choose to wait, reserve a ride with a woman driver for a later time, or choose a ride with any available driver that may not match their preference,” an Uber spokesperson said in an email to CBS MoneyWatch.
Riders can also set a preference for women drivers in their Uber settings, which will boost the chances of being paired with a female driver, although such a match isn’t guaranteed, the company said.
Likewise, Uber drivers who are women can also request trips with female riders, including during peak hours when they can earn more, the company said. Women drivers can toggle the “women rider preference” option in their app settings to get paired with female customers, it added.
Uber has offered similar programs in other countries, rolling out its “women rider preference” in Saudi Arabia in 2019, after women were given the right to drive in that country. “Since then, the feature has expanded to 40 countries, completing over 100 million trips,” the company said.
In 2023, ride-hailing company Lyft launched its Women+ Connect feature, which matches women and nonbinary drivers with more women and nonbinary riders. The feature is available in all U.S. cities where Lyft operates.
#Uber #starting #service #women #choose #female #drivers #fellow #riders
SpaceX launched twin satellites for NASA Wednesday that will study how the electrically-charged solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, creating constantly changing and occasionally dangerous “space weather” affecting satellites, electrical grids and other critical systems.
The identical TRACERS satellites will operate in the magnetosphere, “the region around our Earth that is dominated by the planet’s magnetic field, and it protects us from the stellar radiation and really from everything else that’s going on in space,” said Joseph Westlake, director of NASA’s solar physics division.
“What we will learn from TRACERS is critical for the understanding and eventually the predicting of how energy from our sun impacts the Earth and our space and ground-based assets, whether it be GPS or communication signals, power grids, space assets and our astronauts working up in space.
“It’s going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth.”
SpaceX 
Hitching a ride to space along with TRACERS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were five other small satellites, including one that will use a new “polylingual” terminal to communicate with multiple other satellites and space probes using different protocols.
Another will collect data about how much solar energy Earth absorbs and reemits into space, known as the “radiation budget,” and another that will focus on how high-energy “killer electrons” are knocked out of the Van Allen radiation belts to rain down into the atmosphere.
Two other small satellites were aboard, including an experimental “cubesat” that will test high-speed 5G communications technology in space and another built by an Australian company carrying five small satellites to test space-based air-traffic management technology that could provide aircraft tracking and communications anywhere in the world.
The mission got underway at 2:13 p.m. EDT when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life at launch complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the California coast. The launching one day late because of a regional power outage Tuesday that interrupted air traffic communications over the Pacific Ocean near Vandenberg.
The second time around, the countdown ticked smoothly to zero and after boosting the upper stage and payloads out of the lower atmosphere, the first stage peeled away, reversed course and flew back to a landing near the launch pad.
SpaceX 
A few seconds later, the upper stage engine shut down to put the vehicle in its planned preliminary orbit. The two satellites making up the primary TRACERS payload were deployed about an hour-and-a-half after launch.
Two of the other smallsats were to be released earlier in a slightly different orbit, with the remainder following TRACERS a few minutes later.
TRACERS is an acronym for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites. The twin spacecraft, built by Boeing, will fly in tandem in the same orbit, 10 seconds to two minutes apart, helping researchers precisely measure rapid changes indicating how the solar wind “couples” with Earth’s magnetic field.
“So the Sun is a burning, fiery ball of plasma and as it burns, it blows off an exhaust that we call the solar wind, it’s a plasma, and that’s always streaming from the sun towards the Earth,” said David Miles, principal investigator at the University of Iowa.
“And sometimes, the magnetic field of the Earth basically stands it off in the same way that if you have a rock in a stream, the water kind of flows around it. But other times, those two systems couple (and) you dump mass, energy and momentum into the Earth system.”
NASA 
That coupling drives spectacular auroral displays, “but it also drives some of the negative things that we want to… understand and mitigate, like unplanned electrical currents in our electrical grids that can potentially cause accelerated aging in electrical pipelines, disruption of GPS, things like that.”
“So what we’re looking at trying to understand is how the coupling between those systems changes in space and in time,” Miles said.
The goals of the other satellites launched Wednesday range from basic science to technology development. The Polylingual Experimental Terminal, or PExT, will test equipment capable of sending and receiving data from multiple government and commercial satellites across multiple communications protocols.
The goal is to streamline communications to and from a wide variety of satellites and space probes to improve efficiency and lower costs.
SpaceX 
Another satellite, known as Athena-EPIC, will continue ongoing measurements of Earth’s radiation budget, the balance between solar energy coming into Earth’s environment compared to the energy radiated back out into space.
Using spare parts from earlier missions, Athena-EPIC will test innovative LEGO-like satellite components intended to lower costs while reducing the size of satellites.
The Relativistic Atmospheric Loss, or REAL, satellite, another small cubesat, will study how electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts get knocked out of place to pose threats to satellites and other systems. Robyn Millan of Dartmouth College is the principal investigator.
“The radiation belts are a region surrounding the Earth that are filled with high-energy charged particles that are traveling at near the speed of light,” she said. “These are sometimes called killer electrons because these particles are a hazard for our satellites in space. They also rain down on our atmosphere where they can contribute to ozone destruction.”
The REAL cubesat weighs less than 10 pounds and measures just a foot long. Despite its small size, “it carries a powerful particle sensor that will for the first time make very rapid measurements of these electrons as they enter our atmosphere, and this is really critical for understanding what’s scattering them.”
What makes REAL unique, she said, was the sensor’s small size, allowing it to be carried by a cubesat, which “could enable future missions, especially those requiring constellations of satellites.”
#NASA #probes #study #solar #wind #triggers #potentially #dangerous #space #weather
Washington — Department of Homeland Security headquarters, several of its component agencies and the Department of Health and Human Services have been hacked as part of a wider breach of Microsoft’s SharePoint service, according to multiple U.S. officials.
Microsoft confirmed its software was targeted by Chinese actors who deployed ransomware on the file sharing and storage platform.
“Microsoft has observed two named Chinese nation-state actors, Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon exploiting these vulnerabilities targeting internet-facing SharePoint servers,” the company wrote in a blog post earlier this week. Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday he was “not familiar with the specifics” of the cyberattack and accusations of Chinese culpability.
Two sources told CBS News that SharePoint was unavailable for several hours on Tuesday for users at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The National Institutes of Health was also impacted by the breach. NIH conducts biomedical research and studies infectious diseases.
A White House official said the White House is “closely monitoring the situation,” and that the government “acted very quickly to immediately identify and mitigate this hack.”
“We are working with all agencies to patch vulnerabilities and mitigate impact,” the official said.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “quickly launched a national coordinated response through an initial alert and two cybersecurity updates” when the vulnerability was detected last Friday.
“CISA has been working around the clock with Microsoft, impacted agencies, and critical infrastructure partners to share actionable information, apply mitigation efforts, implement protective measures, and assess preventative measures to shield from future attacks,” McLaughlin said, adding that there is “no evidence of data exfiltration at DHS or any of its components at this time.”
Microsoft has issued a software update to patch the vulnerability.
In April, President Trump fired General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command.
contributed to this report.
#DHS #HHS #among #federal #agencies #hacked #Microsoft #SharePoint #breach
In 2018, Brian Hofer and his younger brother were driving to visit their parents for Thanksgiving. It should have been a routine trip.
But that evening they found themselves held at gunpoint by a group of law enforcement officers.
The incident was the result of technology gone wrong. Hofer’s vehicle had been flagged as stolen by an Automated License Plate Reader — ALPR — system. When he drove by, the reader alerted authorities.
“Your life definitely is different after you have guns pointed at you,” he said.
This incident is one of over a dozen cases verified by CBS News during a six-month investigation into incidents of wrongful stops and even several instances of ALPR technology being abused.
The consequences of ALPR errors can range from the inconvenient — such as mistaken toll booth charges — to the potentially dangerous, such as Hofer’s armed detainment. In some instances the technology was improperly used by authorities, such as in Kansas, where law enforcement officers used license plate reader systems to stalk former partners in two separate incidents.
CBS News 
The rise of ALPR systems
In use since at least the late 1990s, automated license plate reader systems have advanced quickly in recent years. They now marry high-speed, high-resolution cameras with artificial intelligence to scan every license plate passing through a designated field of vision. The data is then compared against license plate numbers in databases.
Thousands of agencies use these systems daily to scan plates in real time and identify potential matches. Departments use ALPRs as a crime-fighting tool to gather evidence for investigations and reduce crime as well as for traffic compliance.
According to a survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, every police department overseeing more than 1 million citizens reported using the technology, as did 90% of sheriff’s offices with 500 or more sworn deputies.
Law enforcement officials told CBS News that the technology has allowed them to do their job more efficiently and has helped solve crimes ranging from stolen vehicles to missing persons cases.
Pat Yoes, the national president of The National Fraternal Order of Police, an organization of hundreds of thousands of sworn law enforcement officers, said in an emailed statement to CBS News that ALPRs are “extraordinarily important in cases where there is an immediate threat to life or safety, as in an abduction or an armed threat driving to a target,” adding that the information can be valuable in generating leads and closing cases.
Getty Images 
He said transparency is key. “The community should be made aware of the new technology, how it’s used in the field, how it contributes to public safety, and how it addresses any privacy concerns,” he said in the statement. “Technology like ALPRs is a valuable tool for many law enforcement agencies to make their communities safer.”
The rise of ALPR systems comes as law enforcement agencies across the country face staffing and recruiting challenges. A 2024 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a professional association, found that U.S. agencies are operating at a nearly 10% staffing deficit. ALPR technology is one way to help fill this gap in manpower.
Why license plate readers make errors — what we found
License plate reader errors may occur for a variety of reasons. In some cases, letters or numbers are interpreted incorrectly by the Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, software. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, common issues including glare or misaligned cameras could impact accuracy. CBS News found that mistakes are often due to a mix of machine and human or administrative errors.
In Española, New Mexico, a 12-year-old was handcuffed after an ALPR camera misread the last number of a license plate on a vehicle driven by her older sister as a “7” instead of the “2” it actually ended with, according to a lawsuit filed against the city. A month later, in a separate incident, a 17-year-old honors student was held at gunpoint in Española on his way home from school after officers mistook his vehicle for one associated with an individual who was being sought in connection with a string of armed robberies.
In Aurora, Colorado, in 2020, a mother and her family, including her 6-year-old daughter, were pulled over at gunpoint and forced to lie face down on hot pavement. Again, ALPR technology was central to the stop. Police mistakenly flagged their Colorado license plate as matching that of a completely different vehicle from a different state — a stolen motorcycle registered in Montana. The incident, captured on video and widely condemned, led to a $1.9 million settlement from the city in 2024.
Privacy and accuracy concerns
The ACLU warns ALPR cameras could infringe on civil rights and violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment by encouraging unreasonable searches. Despite widespread use, there is no federal legislative framework for ALPR use.
Hofer, who has been involved in privacy advocacy for over a decade, is now the executive director of Secure Justice, an organization that aims to reduce government and corporate overreach. He says manual verification is necessary to see whether ALPR “hits,” or matches, are accurate. Even so, he said, such checks are insufficient because data errors could cause a plate to “match” an incorrect entry in a database.
“There are billions of scans a day in America. If there’s even just a 10% error rate, that means there are so many opportunities for abuse to happen,” Hofer said.
Some concerned citizens are taking action. Last year, residents of Norfolk, Virginia, filed a federal lawsuit against the city, and in Illinois, two residents have sued the Illinois State Police over ALPR systems, arguing that their use violates Fourth Amendment rights. The latter case was dismissed without prejudice in April.
contributed to this report.
#license #plate #readers #wrong
AI gets a lot of attention for eliminating human jobs, but more and more it is also creating them.
The number of job postings that mention artificial intelligence has climbed in recent years as employers seek workers versed in AI, a recent report from the Brookings Institution shows, In the last year alone, AI-themed job postings increased by over 100%, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank found.
AI-related job postings have grown at an average annual rate of nearly 29% over the last 15 years — that outstrips the 11% rate of postings in the general economy, said Brookings, which based its findings on data from labor market analytics firm Lightcast.
Demand for AI expertise is growing as more companies start to integrate AI into their workflows. The share of companies using AI in the manufacturing sector has more than doubled from 4% in early 2023 to roughly 9% as of mid-2025, according to Brookings, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS).
Yet while AI job growth has accelerated in recent years, it makes up only a small fraction of the labor market overall. Investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates the peak pace of adoption will hit in the early 2030s.
“AI is definitely visible in the micro labor market data, but it doesn’t look like it’s driving the overall labor market dynamic,” said Joseph Briggs, a senior global economist at Goldman Sachs.
What kind of AI jobs?
The burgeoning AI job market involves a mix of skill sets ranging from advanced AI-specific roles, such as AI engineers, to more general AI-related positions such as software developers, according to Elena Magrini, global head of research at Lightcast.
In 2025, more than 80,000 job postings mentioned generative AI skills, up from 3,780 in 2010, according to Brookings.
Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said in an email to CBS MoneyWatch that the accelerating adoption of AI by businesses is spurring demand for consultants who can help companies integrate AI. Job listings relating to so-called responsible AI jobs, which focus on the ethical use of AI tools in business and society, are also on the rise, according to Indeed.
“In other words, the definition of what it means to be an ‘AI job’ is changing every day as businesses find new and creative ways to incorporate the technology responsibly,” Stahle said.
AI positions may prove an especially appealing sector of the U.S. labor market given that they tend to be associated with higher salaries. Job postings that mention AI skills pay an average of $18,000, or 28%, more per year than for similar roles that don’t require AI skills, according to a separate report from Lightcast.
Where are AI jobs to be found?
Unsurprisingly, AI job growth tends to be concentrated in tech hubs like Silicon Valley, which accounts for 13% of all AI-related job postings. Seattle accounts for 7% according to data from Lightcast.
But AI jobs are starting to surface in other parts of the country including the Sunbelt and along the East Coast between Boston and Washington, D.C. said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. Universities have also been a catalyst for AI job growth, he noted.
Magrini noted that AI skills are increasingly required in other non-tech fields like marketing, human resources and finance. Over half of job postings requesting AI skills in 2024 were outside IT and computer science, according to Lightcast data.
While uptake is uneven across geographic areas, Muro said he expects AI adoption by employers to increase more rapidly in the coming years as they figure out its benefits and limitations.
“There does seem to be good consensus that this is very important for productivity and that it does really energize regional leaders and business people,” he said.
#Job #listings #people #skills #rising #fast
#Facebook #bans #researchers #practices #sparking #criticism
The most downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store currently isn’t ChatGPT, Threads or Google. It’s Tea, a dating advice app that lets women review men they’ve gone out with, as well as warn other single women about dates they claim went awry.
Tea Dating Advice, an app for helping women vet their dates, is also a top app on the Google Play Store, where it’s been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
The app’s maker says it offers a measure of security for users that traditional dating apps don’t. Tea doesn’t match singles with potential dates; rather, it’s a place for women to share information about men they’ve dated. Tea lets users run background checks on potential matches, check to see if they have criminal records or appear on sex offender databases, and more, all through the app.
The app also ensures that users who sign up are women by requesting that they submit a selfie for verification. That’s aimed at protecting users against so-called catfishing schemes, in which people create fake online personas, often as part of a scheme to defraud others.
Tea declined to comment for this article.
Safety in numbers
To be sure, most of the features that Tea offers already exist. Social media forums, such as the Facebook group called “Are we dating the same guy?,” also let women compare notes about their dates in a community forum. The main difference: scale. Tea has more than 1.6 million users, according to its website.
“What this app seems to be doing is centralizing all that into one very large community,” Doug Zytko, an associate professor at the University of Michigan-Flint who researches human-computer interactions for safety, told CBS MoneyWatch.
Zytko, who has extensively studied dating app designs, said that safety “has not been prioritized” for most such tools in the market, which he said helps explain why Tea has struck a chord with women.
“The dating app safety features that exist are largely reactive in nature. They’re not about keeping people safe, but are punitive actions one can take after something has occurred,” he added.
Zytko also acknowledged the concerns of some men, voiced on forums like Reddit, that Tea users could share false information about them.
“If inaccurate information about a man is being shared, that damages his dating prospects and social reputation,” Zytko said. “That’s scary, but it’s not a reason to discount the app.”
Another potential risk is one common to all social media platform, and digital information more broadly. Tea confirmed to CBS News that its app was hacked Friday morning, with bad actors accessing a data storage system containing information, including selfies, that members had uploaded prior to February 2024.
Additionally, hackers accessed almost 60,000 images from posts, plus comments and direct messages, the company said.
“Tea has engaged third-party cybersecurity experts and are working around the clock to secure its systems,” the company said in a statement, noting that it is investigating the incident. “At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that additional user data was affected.”
#Forget #ChatGPT #Tea #downloaded #app #Apples #App #Store