People actually installed temu? Every single ad they put out made it painfully obvious they were a scam app.

I don’t really have a problem believing this. There seem to be an increasing number of apps - often promoted through ads in social media - which are required to do operations that just as easily could be done via a website, but are likely a requirement in other to additional harvesting capabilities of an installed app or malware

I’m a big fan of creating thousands of folders with machine generated names to house my 27,000 Java files with, you guess it, more machine generated names.

I was prepared to roll my eyes after their introduction which was pure conjecture, but they they started pushing data. Individually these strange practices aren’t conclusive evidence for malware, but combined it’s hard to see any legitimate use for this kind of design for a company acting in good faith.

I really hate all those apps who make a fake folder in Pictures called “.gs_fs3” (or similar) filled with dummy pictures that actually contain unique identifier data

My fix for those apps (unfortunately I need taobao and Alibaba for work and I can’t just uninstall them) is to create an empty file called .gs_fs3 so taobao can’t own it and populate it with the tracking data

Holy moly. I went through the ENTIRE article, and just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, it just kept on getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse.

When something has been agressively advertised as much as I’ve seen Temu, there’s no way I’m going to install that trash on my phone.

temu is a blatant scam even without the spyware. its sad so many people fall for it just so they can buy more cheap garbage.

Considering that AliExpress and Wish have the bad fame of being both dirt-cheap and dirt-quality, I was surprised that Temu actually managed to snatch a slice of the budget pie. Temu being a privacy trojan to fetch as much personal data from gullible customers as possible makes a lot of sense in retrospect