I’m sure Temu collects all information you put into the app and your behaviour in it, but this guy is making some very bold claims about things that just aren’t possible unless Temu is packing some serious 0-days.

For example he says the app is collecting your fingerprint data. How would that even happen? Apps don’t have access to fingerprint data, because the operating system just reports to the app “a valid fingerprint was scanned” or “an unknown fingerprint was scanned”, and the actual fingerprint never goes anywhere. Is Temu doing an undetected root/jailbreak, then installing custom drivers for the fingerprint sensor to change how it works?

And this is just one claim. It’s just full of bullshit. To do everything listed there it would have to do multiple major exploits that are on state-actor level and wouldn’t be wasted on such trivial purpose. Because now that’s it’s “revealed”, Google and Apple would patch them immediately.

But there is nothing to patch, because most of the claims here are just bullshit, with no technical proof whatsoever.

The study and evidence was already provided months ago

grizzlyreports.com/we-believe-pdd-is-a-dying-frau…

This was also linked in the article if you read it

Here’s the actual relevant part:

These are security risks to be sure, and while these permissions are (mostly) on the surface, possibly defensible, together they do clearly represent an app trying to gather all of the data that it can.

However, a lot of info from this report is overblown. For example code compilation is sketchy to be sure, but without a privilege escalation attack, it can’t do anything the app couldn’t do with an update.

Also, there’s some weird language in the report, like counting the green security issues in other apps (like tiktok) as if they were also a problem, despite the image showing that green here means it doesn’t present that particular risk.

All of this to say, if you have temu, probably uninstall it. It’s clearly collecting all the data it can get.

But it’s unlikely to be the immediate threat that will have China taking over your phone like this report implies.