Temu is sued again! Facing the third class action lawsuit

Temu has gained a lot of popularity in North America by appearing in the Super Bowl for two consecutive years . Coupled with the fact that you can buy a wide variety of low-priced products, Temu has become very popular overseas.

Temu 's yellow advertisement " shop like a billionaire " is still fresh in people's minds. In Canada, many consumers got to know this platform from here. It is reported that as of May 31, Temu ranked first among free applications in the Canadian Apple App Store and Google Play Store .

Just when Temu was making great strides in Canada, it was targeted by Canadian legal professionals. They believed that Temu violated the privacy rights of local consumers and therefore launched a class action lawsuit against Temu.

It is worth mentioning that this is the third class action lawsuit faced by Temu, the other two occurred last year in New York (USA) and Illinois (USA). This third lawsuit was initiated by lawyers in Quebec (Canada) and is limited to Temu users in the province.

One of the plaintiff's lawyers believes that Temu's application accesses user data through mobile phone cameras, photos, messages, contacts, etc. , but when downloading the application, Temu did not provide a detailed explanation of the "invasiveness" of the permissions, so consumers were unaware of the impact these permissions would have on them.

The lawyer believes that some of the content that the Temu app asks to see is irrelevant to its function and believes that this "privacy invasion" is intentional. Therefore, they asked the court to issue an injunction to prevent Temu from obtaining data in Quebec and are seeking damages for the privacy rights protected in the Charter.

Another lawyer said that in addition to collecting biometric information, Temu has also been collecting users' geospatial data to track their location history, which has nothing to do with online shopping.

In its response statement, Temu stated that when the APP uses pictures to leave comments or search for products through pictures on iOS devices , it uses the camera , but does not require all permissions of the smartphone photo application ; when actually collecting and using data, the platform also follows the principle of minimization, that is, only collecting and using data required for specific and reasonable scenarios; in addition, in "most countries", including Canada, Temu does not require users to provide location access permissions.

It is reported that most of the class action lawsuit is based on a September 2023 report by Grizzly Research. Grizzly's report believes that Temu's security is questionable and that the scope of its application has exceeded the rules in the company's privacy policy.

However, the above three class action lawsuits have not yet received the support of the court, so the development direction of the three lawsuits is still unknown.

Temu

Class Action

The third case