Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is “dangerous malware” that’s secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Griffin cited research and media reports exposing Temu’s allegedly nefarious design, which “purposely” allows Temu to “gain unrestricted access to a user’s phone operating system, including, but not limited to, a user’s camera, specific location, contacts, text messages, documents, and other applications.”

“Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users,” Griffin’s complaint said. “Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place.”

  • tardigrada@beehaw.orgOP
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    4 months ago

    One thing that’s obvious here on Lemmy is that whataboutism works only in one direction. If an article is critical of China, Russia, Iran, or other dictatorships, you’d read, “But about U.S./EU/the West”. But there are tons of articles here critical of Western countries, and it’s accepted. Why is this? Just wumaos?

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      4 months ago

      Lemmy was designed to be a place where communists would have a community. Some instances weren’t, but a lot of the original ones were.

      • tardigrada@beehaw.orgOP
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        4 months ago

        Yeah, these are the ‘tankies’ who got banned on Reddit, right? I guess it takes time until they get a minority, but it’s good that the community grows steadily.

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      It’s funny that every time someone points out the pot calling the kettle black the training kicks in to shout “whataboutism” and it must be “wumao”. It’s almost a meme. You don’t think an article about Xi Ping’s government warning about USAian surveillance would be mocked and ridiculed due to their Great Firewall? That wouldn’t be “whataboutism” though, right? It would be a “critical opinion”?

      Anti Commercial-AI license

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        an article about Xi Ping’s government warning about USAian surveillance

        Not possible. The CCP doest “warn”, it orders to block the app/site/word/photo, and it never existed. Anyone daring to say that it did, or to warn of stuff the CCP didn’t say, gets imprisoned or worse (see: the doctor who dared to warn abot COVID, instead of following CCP’s truth).

    • sunzu@kbin.run
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      4 months ago

      Because people live there and that’s what they care about.

      Also this article is shiti propaganda. Is temu shite… Ya, you ain’t got to use.

      Good luck trying to have a normal life without use big tech lol

      Which is a lot more dangerous than temu or tiktok from personal privacy and security perspective.