Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin announced Tuesday that his office will sue Chinese mobile shopping app Temu for fraud and privacy violations, declaring the app “functionally malware” and a threat to the United States.
“Tem is not an online marketplace like Amazon or Walmart. It is a data theft business selling products online as a means to an end,” Griffin said. Said In a statement, he said Tem was “led by former Chinese Communist Party officials and poses serious security risks to our country and its people.”
The application, which in just two years has become one of the largest e-commerce companies operating in the United States, is accused of violating the Arkansas Unfair Trade Practices Act (ADTPA) and the Arkansas Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).
Temu is a shopping app that offers a wide range of very cheap products of questionable quality shipped directly from China. Pinduoduo (PDD) is a Chinese company known for its aggressive e-commerce strategies, selling products at huge discounts to eliminate competitors and drive them out of the market. Like other Chinese companies, Temu is legally Required Sharing data collected from customers and other sources with the Communist Party and ultimately the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Tem is also implicated in the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by China against Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other Turkic ethnic groups in occupied East Turkestan. A report by the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Communist Party of China, released in June 2023, concluded that there is a “high risk” of acquiring products tainted by the slave trade when shopping on Tem or the Chinese e-commerce app Shein.
The Arkansas lawsuit focuses not on the slave trade, but on the threat that Americans’ personal data could end up in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army through Temu. Lawmakers say Temu appears to be exploiting loopholes in the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) to sell products tainted by the slave trade to Americans.
““While Temu is known as an e-commerce platform, its functions are malware and spyware,” Arkansas Attorney General Griffin said in a statement Tuesday. “Temu is purposefully designed to gain unlimited access to users’ mobile phone operating systems, override data privacy settings on users’ devices, and monetize this unauthorized data collection.”
In the lawsuit Article“Temu is purposefully designed to gain unlimited access to a user’s phone’s operating system, including the user’s camera, certain location information, contacts, text messages, documents and other applications,” Arkansas said.
“Temu is designed to make this broad access undetectable, even to sophisticated users,” it warned.
Griffin noted that Tem has long been plagued by allegations of mishandling personal information and vowed to “vigorously oppose Tem’s efforts to profit from the privacy rights of Arkansans.”
This lawsuit is the first against Tem, and because Tem’s practices are consistent across the U.S., it is possible that similar legal action will be filed in other states.
TEAM Release Companies selling goods directly from China, which arrived in the US in September 2022. Notably, the UFLPA, which took effect in June 2022, bans the importation of goods from occupied East Turkestan into the US unless the importer can prove that the products are not linked to slave labor. While human rights groups welcomed the law as a positive step, it had two major loopholes: products shipped from other provinces in China are not subject to the same scrutiny, and the law contains an exception for packages under $800.
As of December, The Wall Street Journal report The average Temu package is worth $29.
Extremely low pricing and a massive marketing campaign, including three Super Bowl ads, have propelled Temu to the top of America’s most popular apps. Most Downloaded The application was filed ahead of the Super Bowl ad in the US in 2023. Person in Charge That will account for a large portion of the $8.4 billion in profits PinDuoDuo reports for 2023.
The local Fox 16 KLRT network spoke to Arkansas shoppers on Tuesday and found that most are hesitant to stop shopping with Temu, even though their personal data is at risk.
“Sometimes I end up buying things I don’t really need, but when the price is low I just can’t resist,” admitted shopper Stephanie Adcox.
Another shopper, Heather Wicker, told Fox 16 KLRT that her mother is “addicted to Temu” and doesn’t think the lawsuit will hurt Temu’s customer base because “all the other websites are using my personal information so I don’t think people are going to stop shopping with me.”
Tem’s overwhelming popularity and Americans’ apparent willingness to ignore concerns about his human rights record and data collection was featured prominently in a parody commercial for a fake Chinese e-commerce brand. Saturday Night Live In May, the actors confirmed they would continue to purchase the merchandise.
Tem has also reportedly begun changing the way competing American companies do business, according to a report released Wednesday. Forbes I got it. American shopping giant Walmart has become increasingly reliant on cheap, questionable Chinese vendors for its online sales.
“In April 2023, just 1.8% of all new sellers on Walmart Marketplace were new Chinese sellers. By October 2023, that figure reached 24%, and by April 2024, 73.8%, a record high.” Forbes Walmart reported seeing a surge in Chinese sellers on its site, putting the company at risk of selling products tainted by slave labor, and said it attributed this to a “fairly new” Chinese “seller engagement initiative.”
