A new ultra-cheap Chinese shopping app taking Britain by storm could be illegally harvesting the data of phone users, claims a report.
Temu, pronounced tee-moo, offers shoppers cut-price products shipped directly from Chinese factories. It launched in the UK in April and has surged in popularity, becoming the most-downloaded app on Google’s Play Store following similar success in the US.
Distinguished by its bright orange logo, Temu is thought to have more than nine million users in the UK who have been drawn in by its ultra-low prices and free delivery.
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But alarm bells are ringing among analysts and observers of Chinese companies.
This month, financial analyst Siegfried Eggert, the boss of US firm Grizzly Research, published a report claiming Temu was one of the ‘most dangerous’ popular apps, alleging it contained ‘aggressive’ programmes designed to harvest data.
Eggert also accused Temu’s owner, Chinese e-commerce giant PDD, of ‘intentionally’ hiding the software within the app.
‘We Believe Temu is the most dangerous app in wide circulation,’ the report said.
They were talking about it on the radio today and everyone seems to have gone Temu mad, helped by their unsustainable business model making everything wildly cheap (which I must admit is making my intrigued).
Leaving aside privacy concerns and the fact that all the spinning roulette wheel nonsense makes it look dodgy (which tries very hard to drive you to us the app, which is where the privacy concerns come in - coincidence?), as well as the allegations of slave labour, the thing that puts me off is that everything in their ads looks like some kind of sexual device.
Same as Wish - everything they advertise is “wtf is that thing”. Probably designed to make you click and look. They’ve got you at that point.
It’s a whole heap of utter crap though. Actually depressing to browse through.