Read with very high levels of suspicion: there’s a huge number of errors in this article.
The issues discussed seem surface-level troublesome to me. But they’re extremely weasel-words and/or exaggerated. I don’t think these guys have found a smoking gun, there’s a lot of problems with this code but…
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The permission list doesn’t seem to match reality. The argument seems to be “TEMU code references these permissions, so they must try to get the permissions somehow”. These red-flag permissions aren’t on the Google Play store manifest however.
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Very basic errors involving MAC Addresses and other fundamental computer concepts.
Etc. etc. The core problems here might be true, but I’ll need a more legitimate tech-site to go over the data and actually tell me what the problem is, because a lot of this “article” is just hyperbolic fluff.
Hacker News has been talking about it (a venture capitalist forum, not really about “Hackers” per se). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427008 . Good discussion so far.
This is obviously a “Bear” company blogpost that short-sells a stock and then publishes negative data on that company. So remember, if the stock price falls, this blog makes money. That’s their goal. I’m not saying that they’re wrong, or that the stock price shouldn’t fall, just remember that this is where the profits are for this “grizzly” company.
That’s why I’d personally like an Android developer / security specialist go over the claims and tell me if there’s actually a red-flag here or not.
I want to know what the F is going on… because this is the second medium I have seen this on. There are a handful of Tiktok videos warning people of getting their credit card or banking info stolen after using Temu. Is this some coordinated stock shakedown, or is it really that bad? It’s interesting either way.
Getting your warnings about Chinese spyware from TikTok is like watching for icebergs ahead of the Titanic after it’s already cracked in half and on the way to the bottom.
Ya, Tiktok bad. But the complaints aren’t about spyware, its about some vulnerability on Temu that seems to be leaking card info to hackers.
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People should be leery of every Chinese app they install.
That picture frame you bought for Xmas. That RGB light strip you got for the backyard that is app controlled. That impossibly cheap set of speakers, that once again, require a shady app to work right. I don’t care how locked down we think our phones are, I have no doubt that these Chinese apps are harvesting our data. Temu is probably no different. Red China is dumping a bunch of cheap crap into our mailboxes and those low prices are, in part, being made up by stealing our data.
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I have been hearing stories of people here experiencing credit card fraud after buying stuff off TEMU. I wouldnt touch it myself, looks too good to be true
Anecdata I know, but all my purchases with Temu have been a positive experience so far. Yes dirt cheap with questionable quality items, but delivery is much quicker than e.g. Amazon. That said, I didn’t use a credit card but iDeal instead (Dutch system, much harder to fraud).
