We believe PDD is a Dying Fraudulent Company and its Shopping App TEMU is Cleverly Hidden Spyware that Poses an Urgent Security Threat to U.S. National Interests

People actually installed temu? Every single ad they put out made it painfully obvious they were a scam app.

I run Google ads for small businesses and what blows my mind is how much money TEMU has. They throw money at advertising like it's unlimited. Every client in the e-commerce space is being outbid by TEMU at every search, and they're overlapping/appearing above them in 80-90% of all searches.

They even appear above amazon most of the time. It's insane how much they're spending.

We used to just have to put up with Amazon because they're huge and we can't compete, but now competing against two giant budgets is frustrating.

I don't really have a problem believing this. There seem to be an increasing number of apps - often promoted through ads in social media - which are required to do operations that just as easily could be done via a website, but are likely a requirement in other to additional harvesting capabilities of an installed app or malware

I really hate all those apps who make a fake folder in Pictures called ".gs_fs3" (or similar) filled with dummy pictures that actually contain unique identifier data

My fix for those apps (unfortunately I need taobao and Alibaba for work and I can't just uninstall them) is to create an empty file called .gs_fs3 so taobao can't own it and populate it with the tracking data

I’m a big fan of creating thousands of folders with machine generated names to house my 27,000 Java files with, you guess it, more machine generated names.

I was prepared to roll my eyes after their introduction which was pure conjecture, but they they started pushing data. Individually these strange practices aren’t conclusive evidence for malware, but combined it’s hard to see any legitimate use for this kind of design for a company acting in good faith.

Can't say this is surprising. I remember when TEMU ads started coming out en masse. Their "shop like a billionaire" catchphrase for buying cheap ripped-off crap gave off red flags and latestagecapitalism vibes. It's frustrating to see how many people fell for the marketing and have actually downloaded and used this app.

When something has been agressively advertised as much as I've seen Temu, there's no way I'm going to install that trash on my phone.

Holy moly. I went through the ENTIRE article, and just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it just kept on getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse.

temu is a blatant scam even without the spyware. its sad so many people fall for it just so they can buy more cheap garbage.

Huh, I use an ad blocker and have never seen a TEMU ad, nor have I heard about it. I also don't use Google (DDG, so basically Bing) and either never saw it or just never noticed it. I don't watch live TV, I only stream from platforms with an ad-free tier. Yet it has over a hundred million installs without being in China at all, which is absolutely nuts to me!

The same goes for TikTok, and I think I heard about it first on SM and then a coworker showed me some videos from it. In fact, stupid TikTok ads were a major reason for me to switch to NewPipe on my phone.

So yeah, absolutely encourage your loved ones to use an ad blocker.

Considering that AliExpress and Wish have the bad fame of being both dirt-cheap and dirt-quality, I was surprised that Temu actually managed to snatch a slice of the budget pie. Temu being a privacy trojan to fetch as much personal data from gullible customers as possible makes a lot of sense in retrospect

Lots of interesting information, but it’s seemingly all conjecture. I did think the following bits were more convincing:

The company has around 100 developers who have created a previously delisted Play store app due to unadvertised data harvesting mechanisms. Once the app had offending features removed, it was reinstated. Helps set up the narrative that this team is at least capable of building in spyware into their product.

The company is estimated to lose around $30 an order when advertising and shipping are factored in. Helps set up a motive to harvest this information… but are they really selling it for enough to make up for the losses?