Folks, Temu is just Wish/Shein/Whatever shitty marketplace of the hour is direct-selling to get around import tariffs and this post in particular is garbage.
The first image is a screenshot from this website, and the article that says "The Temu app is a pyramid scheme that has been gaining popularity recently" ends like this:
The USA Today article and the final screenshot are actually both the same article written by Kim Kommando and hosted on her website AND USA Today where she is a regular contributor. Kommando is not a cybersecurity expert, she is a computer sales and marketing expert who pitches content as a way to sound like you're good at tech even if you don't know anything about tech (which hey, they say to write what you know.)
Kommando is also a Fox tech news contributor and in every mention of China in that article she refers to the country as "Communist China" - so she's recommending that you uninstall Temu so that you're not sending data back to "Communist China."
To be clear: Temu is a datamining piece of shit that sells products produced by underpaid workers and direct ships them from China to you. Their return policy means that if you have a problem you're better off throwing away the problem product than returning or replacing it. It is like if fast fashion weren't just for fashion but was also for garden hoses and car parts. It's only popular because it is spending a shitload of mony on advertising and it is literally the same business model as Wish there isn't anything special about it. Temu sucks and you shouldn't install it and honestly none of us should be using these absolute trash direct sales marketplaces because there is a global impact to cheap consumerism that doesn't seem worth the exchange of encouraging businesses like this to exist as a tradeoff for getting a shitty five dollar polyester dress in the mail.
Temu is bad but it is not especially or uniquely bad, and it seems bad for privacy but not in a way that is any worse than facebook.
OP has actually updated the original post with a Snopes link, an exhortation to do your own research, and an apology for any implied Sinophobia but I still kind of want to yell a little bit.
The "do your own research check your own sources" thing only works when you, OP, haven't ignored the conclusions of one of your sources. This post was originally either misleading on purpose OR op just didn't bother to finish reading articles before posting about.
So don't go yell at OP here, but I want people to note that as of this reblog this post is less than a week old and has about 36k notes. I've seen it floating around a few times and I've never seen it with additional information or the update from OP.
It is *difficult* to update incorrect posts on Tumblr and they can grow legs remarkably quickly. If you're going to make informative posts about a subject you need to show your work and screencaps don't actually count, as you can see here.
So yeah i guess this is your general reminder: If you see a post on the internet that upsets you or makes you worried or makes you angry or makes you scared and that post doesn't make it easy for you to check their work and verify what they are saying is true, please don't share it until you've checked to see if it's true for yourself.
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