Cleaning products for less than €2, toothpaste squeezers for 50 cents or even toiletry bags for less than €3. You couldn’t have missed Temuthe new e-commerce giant low cost straight from China. And for good reason ! Advertisements, particularly on social networks, are omnipresent, explains Matthieu Chouard, the general director of foxintelligence by NielsenIQ with our colleagues in BFMTV. The strategy is paying off since our colleagues from the news channel specify that the application has become the most downloaded on French phones in recent weeks. Slashed prices and products purchased from Chinese production companies, without any intermediary. This is the secret of this new e-commerce giant, owned by the Chinese group PDD Holdings Inc. If many users say they are satisfied with their purchases on the site, a certain report casts a shadow over the picture. In fact, at the beginning of September 2023, the American cabinet Grizzly Researchwhich regularly analyzes the practices of Chinese companies operating abroad, warned about the possibility that spyware is present in the application Temu.
Monetized user data?
According to experts, this software would be intended to suck up data, particularly personal data, and would constitute a threat to American national security. In the report in question, dated September 6, 2023, we can read that “hidden functions (…) enable extensive exfiltration of data without users’ knowledge, potentially giving malicious actors full access to almost all data on customers’ mobile devices.” According to Grizzly Research, significant efforts were made by the site to hide the malicious intentions of the application. They also argue that the volume of downloads in Europe and the United States is so large that it poses a risk of a massive data leak. Grizzly Research accused Temu to have a business model solely based on the illegal sale of stolen data to Western customers. Their slogan “shop like a billionaire” thus seems to have a price. For now, Temu did not react to the report on his various social networks. That said, we see on theApp Store that app privacy is less intrusive than Instagram or Facebook.