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Over the past few years, consumers have fallen in love with the online shopping app Temu. The app sells a wide range of products at prices that seem criminally low. However, according to Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, the idea that the company is engaged in actual criminal activity is not at all far-fetched.
The lawyer A has submitted lawsuit against Temu, accusing it of selling low-priced goods in exchange for sensitive information from its customers, who are unaware that the app is quietly collecting personal data from multiple apps on their devices.
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“Teemo is not an online marketplace like Amazon or Walmart,” Griffin said in an interview. press release“It’s stealing data and selling goods online as a means to an end.”
In the lawsuit filed on June 25, Griffin alleges that once a consumer downloads the Temu app on their device, it quietly bypasses the data privacy settings set by users and collects data about the user, making a profit by selling it to third parties.
“Temu is intentionally designed for unrestricted access to a user’s phone operating system, including, but not limited to, the user’s camera, specific location, contacts, text messages, documents, and other applications,” the lawsuit said. “Temu is designed to make this expanded access undetectable, even by sophisticated users.”
Compromising these settings allegedly allows Temu to take control of users’ devices, allowing it to “read the user’s private messages, change phone settings, and track notifications,” according to the lawsuit. The app is also alleged to have obtained biometric information from users’ devices, such as fingerprints.
Temu also allegedly uses misleading requests to obtain information about a user’s “precise location.” For example, when a user tries to upload a photo to the Temu app, the app asks whether or not they have permission to access the user’s “exact” or “approximate” location for what appears to be related to the photo upload, but is allegedly used whenever the user interacts with the app .
The lawsuit also alleges that consumers who have never registered with Temu are also at risk of having their sensitive information collected. Also, consumers who “electronically communicate” with Temu users via text or email may have their private conversations “subject to harvesting.”
Temu did not immediately respond to TheStreet’s request for comment.
Timo has been accused of sharing data with the Chinese government
Timo is owned by PDD Holdings, a “Chinese company subject to Chinese law,” according to the lawsuit. Griffin claims that Chinese law requires the company to cooperate with Chinese national intelligence agencies to provide it with data of “security interests,” which may include data it obtained from American consumers.
More retail:
- Walgreens Limits Purchases of Viral Candy Product
- Target faces nuisance lawsuit for allegedly putting shoppers at risk
- Amazon is giving up on allowing customers this privilege.
This is not the first time that Temu has raised privacy and security concerns. Last year in May, Montana Forbidden Temu from state-level government agencies for being “linked to foreign adversaries.”
Despite Temu’s popularity among consumers, with over 100 million active users in the United States, consumers don’t really trust the app. According to a recent study reconnaissance From Omnisend, only 7% of US consumers surveyed said they trust Temu, but 68% said they still shop through the app despite their lack of trust. Low prices were what Americans in the survey said they liked most about the app.
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