Ideally you'd see fines in the 10%s of revenue. In egregious cases (gross negligence) like this, you should be able to go outside the LLC and recoup from equity holders' personal assets.
Alas, if only we had consumer protections.
A somewhat embarrassing but relevant example: my friends and I used Grindr for years (many still do), and we remained loyal despite the company's terrible track record with user data, privacy, and security as there simply wasn't (and still isn't) a viable alternative offering the same service at the expected level.
It appears Tea saw a pretty large pop in discussion across social channels over the last few days so I'm pretty hopeful this will lend itself to widespread discussion where the users can understand just how poorly this reflects on the company and determine if they want to stick around or jump ship.
That cuts to the issue some other comments have pointed out, that user trust is really their most important capital – and with short attention spans and short news cycles, it may rebound surprisingly fast.
The GDPR in Europe attempts to reset this but it’s still an uphill battle
And some kind of legal penalty for the engineers as well. Just fining the company does nothing to change the behavior of the people who built it in the first place.
Joining in with some other comments on this thread, if the stamp of a certified person was required to submit/sign apps with more than 10K or 100K users and came with personal risk and potential loss of licensure, I imagine things would change quickly.
I'm personally not for introducing more gatekeeping and control over software distribution (Apple/Google already have too much power). Also not sure how you'd make it work in an international context, but would be simple to implement for US based companies if Apple/Google wanted to tackle the problem.
I think the broader issue is that we as a society don't see data exposure or bad development practices as real harm. However, exposing the addresses and personal info of people talking about potentially violent, aggressive or unsafe people seems very dangerous.
https://www.teaforwomen.com/about >With a proven background leading product development teams at top Bay Area tech companies like Salesforce and Shutterfly, Sean [Cook, creator of Tea] leveraged his expertise building innovative technology to create a game-changing platform that prioritizes women’s safety
If you're lucky, a clown vibe coded this trash. If you're unlucky, he paid someone to do so, and despite his proven background about leading top Bay Area companies, didn't even think to check a single time.
The CEO is directly responsible for this.
> With a proven background leading product development teams at top Bay Area tech companies like Salesforce and Shutterfly, Sean [Cook, creator of Tea] leveraged his expertise building innovative technology
Blah blah blah blah blah... Just goes to show that you can write all sorts of powerful sounding words about yourself on your About page, but it doesn't say anything about your actual competence. I mean, I don't have a "proven background leading product development teams" but I sure as shit wouldn't make obvious amateur-level mistakes like this if I ever did a startup.