I hate Temu, but this (apparently contracted?) Grizzly Reports report isn't really all that trust inspiring, tbh.
Our experts identified a stack of software functions that are completely inappropriate to and dangerous
The stack difference to the Amazon app they list:
Package compile
Requesting system logs
Some code obfuscation
Mac address collection
Install permission
Wake lock
Meh. That's just a sliver worse than your regular, off the shelves proprietary corporate app. I don't see how they can pull off the promise of being a truly dynamic Android app from that report.
I do believe they hover up data, but they aren't otherworldly super hackers. They will probably just ask for the data and the users will hand it over in a second. For most people, it really is that simple.
It's probably not blatantly bypassing security and privacy features, what it is PROBABLY doing is using the user to bypass them by simply manipulating them to do it.
Social engineering is way easier than whatever bullshit you would need to do to bypass sandboxing and dynamically recompile, or whatever people are claiming, and my guess would be that this is what they're doing.
If the suit is claiming they are doing what i said, that's probably legal, and not going anywhere, unless tiktok ban bill 2.0. If the suit is claiming what others are claiming, it's still probably wrong and probably going to be tiktok ban bill 2.0.
Unfortunately these things aren't all that exciting at the end of the day.
Can someone explain to me how you can just simply program something to bypass privacy and security features? What is the point of having these features if you can literally just program something to ignore them? Like....??? Temu is obviously bad if this is true, but if it IS true, it shouldn't have been possible to begin with!!
Im not sure how they specifically bypass the features in other ways but I imagine some of it is from users accepting permissions under the guise of another use. For example, maybe you accept the microphone permission on tik tok to record video. With that permission in theory the app could now use it maliciously. Of course it should all depend on the users choice for that and im not sure beyond the scope of that.
TORfdot0 shared this comment below:
Someone else posted this report in this thread which does a good job of the deceptive practices and API calls the app uses to trick the user into giving permissions up willingly and otherwise collect data it shouldn’t.
one of the most obvious ways is to simply not bypass them, and then do it from within the application itself. That way you can essentially man in the middle the rest of it, though this would require a rather specific set of events and a particularly nested design of an app.
It states that it’s somehow breaking the permissions sandbox by dynamically recompiling code after the app is opened. Unless there is some undisclosed exploit that it’s using to break the sandbox, it’s outside most people’s understanding of how these platforms work
Someone else posted this report in this thread which does a good job of the deceptive practices and API calls the app uses to trick the user into giving permissions up willingly and otherwise collect data it shouldn’t.
If it’s $5 and some random assortments of letters for a brand name you might as well just light your money on fire whether you order from temu or amazon or Walmart for that matter
Have any of you actually ever stopped to process what the tagline, "I'm shopping like a billionaire" means?
I've always interpreted it as,
I'm needlessly buying things that don't make me happy, but making the purchase without any hesitation, knowing that the purchase price could never financially impact me in any real way. When I purchase the thing, I'll probably never use it or actually take it out of the box even. It is just empty, hollow. And somewhere inside, I always know that it's all only possible, because I'm actively exploiting the cheap labor of scores of other people that are made to perpetually suffer in generations of abject poverty to allow for my relative comfort...
I am disabled and have limited income I don't have control over increasing or decreasing. I use temu to save a lot of money on essential things that should be cheap but are still overpriced in America. Sponges. Rags. Soaps. Pens. Tools. Home improvement hardware. Plant grow supplies. Gifts for me nieces. The tagline, is just a tagline. Billionaires are not like me and scouring for cheap magic sponges.
Edit: also, temu did not invent drop shipping. Shopping on amazon is literally the same thing.
That's... not what they were saying? They were responding to a comment saying it encourages consumerism by saying that they use it for better prices on things they need regardless
My interpretation of that tagline is that since the prices on Temu are cheap, it means you can shop as if you had a lot of money, without actually spending that much.
Yesterday, I saw a Temu ad for something and I just wanted to open it to read the info and there were so many popups and "spin the wheel for a prize" and "enter your email here" and so on that I gave up and just looked for the info elsewhere. Never clicking on a Temu link again.
I get their CAPTCHA where I have to slide the puzzle piece over to look at one of their ads. More than half the time I will do this and it will fail saying I didn't do it right. So yeah temu has become a trash site.
How about pass and enforce strong digital privacy protection laws you fucking cowards. When other countries spy on us it's scary and bad, but for US companies? Best we can do is ban porn and demand backdoors to stop E2EE messaging.
That would hurt the advertising, spam, blackmail, malware, and propaganda industries. We can't rip out the economic spine of big tech since they pay the best bribes.
California (and a few other states) are trying. The CCPA and CPRA are a good step in the right direction. If you're a California resident, you can request all the data a business has collected about you, tell them to stop sharing it with business partners, or tell them to completely delete it, similar to the GDPR in Europe.
I use it too. Tried a few different ones and like boost the best. I finally just paid for the non-ad tier. One time cost of 3.99. I would have been turned off by a subscription.
Support his development. I will pay to remove the ads at some point when I am not being lazy. Many people like him because he listens, makes changes, has tremendous support and so on. Not to say that others don't but that is just how we roll.
That's what you get for using a proprietary Lemmy app. Switch to Thunder, it doesn't have ads, it's open source and in my opinion has the best UI out of all Lemmy apps. Also support the development and join their community: !thunder_app
I tried using Jerboa and found it to be incredibly buggy and poorly designed. Not sure what's going on there, considering that it's the official mobile app made by the Lemmy devs
