(LifeSiteNews) — A popular new shopping app is the authoritarian Chinese government’s latest front for collecting the personal data of Americans and Europeans, according to China watchdogs and cybersecurity experts.
Politico reports that Temu, the Western version of Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, began operating in the United States in fall 2022 and spread to several European nations earlier this year, has rapidly won fans since for offering a wide range of products at significant discounts.
But between its Chinese roots and privacy issues that have already manifested, experts see the West’s embrace of the app as cause for concern.
Temu, owned by PDD Holdings in Shanghai, automatically tracks and collects user information such as location and combines it with information available from other sources such as government agencies, social networks, and marketing companies, for potential sharing with its parent company and other affiliates.
In March, Google suspended Pinduoduo from its app store upon the discovery of malicious software within the app, while Apple suspended Temu for misleading language about what data it can access and not giving users the option to refuse to allow themselves to be tracked across the internet (Apple allowed the app to return earlier this month after resolving those issues).
“It looks to me like they don’t have a form of reporting vulnerabilities,” said cybersecurity engineer Laurie Mercer with HackerOne. “They don’t have any transparency over their security testing and those would all raise red flags for me.”
“The app was quite complex to look into and has obfuscations, making the code difficult to analyze, which could indicate that they have something to hide,” added cybersecurity analyst Jeroen Becker of the firm NVISO.
That something, Population Research Institute founder Steven Mosher contends, is data collection on behalf of the Chinese regime’s Communist leaders.
“The Chinese Communist Party is engaged in a massive data collection effort all around the world trying to collect information especially not on Americans but all citizens of the world but all seven plus billion of us,” Mosher told Fox News Channel’s Charlie Hurt in an interview over the weekend. “But putting into giant supercomputers using AI to factor out weaknesses and strengths especially of America, the principal target. Everybody needs to understand, the 50 million people especially who downloaded the Temu app need to understand that they are the products here.”
“There are no private companies in China,” Mosher stressed.
Of particular concern, he said, is the fact that the app could give the CCP access to users’ banking information by “ransacking” users’ phones with malware and spyware. “And who knows what the Chinese Communist Party one day will want to do with that information?”
“The trust problem is not in the specific product, but in the company and the country itself,” said Bart Groothuis, a Dutch Member of the European Parliament, who was previously a cybersecurity expert in the Dutch Ministry of Defence. “The country’s intelligence law is quite clear in that any citizen or any company in China must comply with any requests from the intelligence community to advance China’s offensive espionage program.”
For months another app owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance’s TikTok, has been the subject of similar bipartisan scrutiny over its links to the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s military and surveillance operations, prompting ongoing national security concerns. China also continues to spy on the U.S. via more conventional means; last month, the Biden administration acknowledged that the Communist regime has for years maintained spy “eavesdropping” facilities in nearby Cuba.
Additionally, American tech companies have long been accused of playing fast and loose with customers’ privacy all on their own, from Google allegedly illegally collecting facial biometrics without users’ consent, to Apple being able to personally identify users from iPhone App Store data despite claiming otherwise.