“Temu’s cheap products and flashy marketing hide real danger. Their platform can infect Kentuckians’ devices with malware, steal their personal data, and send it directly to the Chinese government,” Coleman said. “At the same time, they’re eroding trust in some of Kentucky’s most iconic brands, which could lead to job losses and hardship.”
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman has filed a lawsuit against Temu, a China-based e-commerce platform, accusing the company of violating state law by misusing consumer data and permitting the sale counterfeit products.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Woodford County Circuit Court, acknowledges that one of Temu’s biggest draws is the low selling price of many of its products. However, Russell’s office claims that Temu “is about much more than cheap goods offered at bargain-basement prices.”
The lawsuit asserts that, among other things, Temu allegedly:
- Collects consumer data without their knowledge or consent
- Shares, or could share, consumer data with the Chinese Communist Party
- Facilitates the theft of intellectual property, including intellectual property owned by Kentucky entities such as the University of Kentucky, the University of Louisville, the Buffalo Trace Distillery, and Churchill Downs
- Uses “forced labor from Chinese ethnic minorities in clear violation of U.S. trade policies”
In a press release, Russell observed that Temu currently ranks among the most-downloaded mobile applications in the United States. But, before Temu took off, its parent company—PDD Holdings—tried to release another application in America, called Pinduoduo.
“Within the last year, a host of security and privacy concerns have been raised about both the Temu app and the Pinduoduo app,” the lawsuit alleges.
Pinduoduo, which shares much of its code with Temu, was eventually banned from U.S. app stores for being malware.
“In mid-2023, Apple suspended the Temu app from the Apple App Store for misrepresentations Temu had made about thee types of data the app can access or collect from users, how it does so, and for what purposes it uses that data,” the lawsuit claims. “Similarly, Google suspended the Pinduoduo app (the forerunner of Temu and the app of its parent company) from its Google Play Store in March 2023 after it was found to contain malware.”
“Temu’s cheap products and flashy marketing hide real danger. Their platform can infect Kentuckians’ devices with malware, steal their personal data, and send it directly to the Chinese government,” Coleman said. “At the same time, they’re eroding trust in some of Kentucky’s most iconic brands, which could lead to job losses and hardship.”
Russell alleges that “news outlets and technologists engaged in their own investigations of the Temu app. These investigations—involving review of the Temu app source code, documentation, network traffic, and/or other dynamic or static analyses, along with interviews of company insiders—revealed that the Temu app has multiple hallmarks of spyware and malware, and engage sin practices that are either not necessary nor appropriate for an e-commerce app.”
The state also claims to have conducted its own independent forensic investigations into both Temu and Pinduoduo, ultimately finding that “the Temu app is designed to collect sensitive user data without the user’s knowledge or consent and is purposely designed so that it can evade detection of this type of data collection by third-party security researchers.”
“Kentuckians need a strong defense against this aggression, and that’s exactly what the Attorney General’s office intends to do,” Russell said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
Sources
Kentucky attorney general sues Temu for allegedly stealing data
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