What is Temu?
Temu is an online store that first premiered in 2022. On Temu, you can find just about anything; clothes to home decorations to electronics. The most enticing thing about this webstore is that most items are under ten dollars – some as low as 2 dollars (or less!) when they would usually be closer to $20 or more. At first, all the coverage of the site was positive and everybody was comparing it to a better version of SHEIN – the notoriously bad online shopping platform. SHEIN, however, mostly sells clothes compared to the mind-boggling variety on Temu. Even more than the already shockingly low prices, celebrities, Tik Tokers, and other popular content creators often provide discount codes or gift cards that reduce the price down to near zero. But due to these incredible prices on items that often actually seem pretty legitimate, many people have started to wonder: Well, what’s the catch?
How are their prices so cheap?
While entirely enticing, and seemingly perfect, this website is not a good thing. Temu is able to keep their prices low in a few ways. This includes device monitoring and malware. Obviously this is a shocking sentence, but unfortunately it is true. Despite the unfortunately low quality of the products that Temu produces, it is almost impossible to maintain such low prices without losing millions of dollars in profit, especially with such a high production rate like theirs.
The way that they avoid this staggering loss is often through data collection. When observing the security settings on Temu, you may notice that they collect a lot of unnecessary information. This can include: Contact information, location information, marketing preferences, payment information, Social Security number, Tax ID number, Drivers License, birthdate, as well as profile names and pictures. Temu has also been known to collect a ridiculous amount of third party data for advertising purposes, and overall online activity. This can include the network you connect to, the browser type, performance logs of your computer, and even the CPU usage on your computer.
Even though this may seem like a plain, illegal scam – it isn’t. Temu does actually state most of this information, yet it gets crammed in with the other terms and conditions, so users often don’t catch them, or simply skip to the “agree” button. Basically, this website is able to install malware and collect device information without issue simply because people didn’t read the full terms and conditions.
Because of this monitoring, Temu has full access to sell this information to third party advertisers, and gain back that profit from their production. While this doesn’t happen every time, there is still a very large possibility that it could.
So let this be a lesson- next time you see “Terms and Conditions” pop up on a new website, maybe give it a look before agreeing and signing away device privacy.
Cites
https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-temu-legit-what-to-know-about-this-wildly-popular-shopping-app/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/beware-of-these-popular-temu-scams-circulating-social-media/#:~:text=Usually%2C%20these%20Temu%20scammers%20will,rewards%20for%20the%20code%20referrer.
https://time.com/6243738/temu-app-complaints/
