Kentucky Attorney General, Russell Coleman, announced on July 17 that the state has filed a lawsuit against Temu, a Chinese e-commerce platform, accusing the company of secretly collecting a large amount of personal data from American users.
Temu is an e-commerce shopping platform from China, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings, a Chinese company.
In the lawsuit filed with the Woodford County Circuit Court, Kentucky also accuses Temu of infringing on intellectual property rights of American companies.
Investigations by the state revealed that the “code-level behaviors” in the Temu application allow the collection of users’ personal information without their knowledge or consent.
The lawsuit claims that such actions pose a threat to user privacy and public safety, partly due to Temu’s operations in China, where the Chinese Cybersecurity Law allows unrestricted access to data owned by Chinese companies by the Chinese government.
The court documents allege that the Temu application collected a “remarkable amount” of sensitive data, far exceeding what is necessary for normal business operations.
Examples of sensitive data collected include precise GPS location of users, a list of other installed applications and associated accounts on users’ phones, cellular data and WiFi networks connected to the phone, and all WiFi networks detected by the phone.
The lawsuit argues that the privacy risks resulting from using the Temu application are not inadvertent but a deliberate part of the application’s design.
Furthermore, the lawsuit states that the application can edit its own code once downloaded on a user’s phone, allowing potential exploitation of personal identity information and other data or potentially controlling a consumer’s device in unknown ways.
Personal identity information refers to any data that can be used to identify a specific individual, including names, addresses, social security numbers, birthdates, gender, and IP addresses.
For instance, one form of exploitation is through notification-sending. According to the lawsuit, Temu incentivizes users to recommend the application to others, rewarding successful referrals with points and gifts like free Nintendo Switch game cards.
A 2023 report by Grizzly Research cited in the court documents warns that providing personal information to Temu results in repeated spam, information bombardment, harassment, and enticement by the company.
Besides the platform itself, third parties also send spam notifications to users. Even after deleting the application from their devices, the lawsuit notes that these emails and notifications continue to be sent.
Temu has denied the accusations by Kentucky, dismissing them as baseless and stemming from “misinformation spread online.”
A spokesman for Temu told the Epoch Times via email on July 20, “We strongly deny these allegations and will actively defend ourselves.”
Temu, owned by Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings, went public in the United States in 2022, marketing itself with the slogan “Shop like a billionaire,” selling low-cost Chinese-manufactured goods to American consumers.
In recent years, Temu’s platform has surged in popularity, becoming the most downloaded free application for Apple in 2023. User screen time spent on the Temu platform daily was reported to be double that of Amazon, according to court documents.
The lawsuit attributes Temu’s platform success to word-of-mouth and aggressive marketing, particularly during the 2024 Super Bowl, where it advertised low-priced products prominently to swiftly capture the American market.
This lawsuit against Temu by Kentucky is not an isolated case. In 2023, Apple suspended the sale of the Temu application on its App Store citing concerns about false product statements and suspicious data collection practices. Similarly, Google removed the Temu sister app Pinduoduo from the Google Play store in March 2023 for containing malicious software.
Several other states have taken legal action against Temu. Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers sued Temu last month, criticizing the platform for lacking a meaningful return policy, pointing out that besides privacy issues, consumers were receiving low-quality products instead of the promised high-quality items.
“For Nebraskans, the platform lacks any meaningful return process, leaving consumers unable to recover their hard-earned money,” Hilgers stated in a release.
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin was even more blunt. In a press release announcing the lawsuit against Temu last June, Griffin said, “Temu is not an online marketplace like Amazon or Walmart. It is a data-stealing enterprise that uses online sales of goods as a means to an end.”
In 2023, Montana prohibited the use of the Temu application on government devices citing concerns over security and privacy. The ban also extended to other applications linked to “foreign adversaries” such as TikTok, WeChat, and Telegram.
(Source: The Epoch Times)