this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Read with very high levels of suspicion: there's a huge number of errors in this article.
The issues discussed seem surface-level troublesome to me. But they're extremely weasel-words and/or exaggerated. I don't think these guys have found a smoking gun, there's a lot of problems with this code but...
The permission list doesn't seem to match reality. The argument seems to be "TEMU code references these permissions, so they must try to get the permissions somehow". These red-flag permissions aren't on the Google Play store manifest however.
Very basic errors involving MAC Addresses and other fundamental computer concepts.
Etc. etc. The core problems here might be true, but I'll need a more legitimate tech-site to go over the data and actually tell me what the problem is, because a lot of this "article" is just hyperbolic fluff.
Hacker News has been talking about it (a venture capitalist forum, not really about "Hackers" per se). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427008 . Good discussion so far.
This is obviously a "Bear" company blogpost that short-sells a stock and then publishes negative data on that company. So remember, if the stock price falls, this blog makes money. That's their goal. I'm not saying that they're wrong, or that the stock price shouldn't fall, just remember that this is where the profits are for this "grizzly" company.
That's why I'd personally like an Android developer / security specialist go over the claims and tell me if there's actually a red-flag here or not.
I really think you're onto something - just the headline (and, remember, the vast majority of people only read the headlines of articles - so the headline is where the company gets the information they want to convey to as many eyes as possible) calls the company:
Just to give a potential shareholder as many reasons as possible to decide "I no longer wish to support this company/I want to get out before this company fails".
Maybe TEMU is a bad company with a bad product, but it's worthless arguing about whether or not this is the case when the article itself cares very little about making concrete points and has an ulterior motive in publishing the article.
Just because they're short-sellers doesn't change the fundamental point though. Everyone has motivations, and short-selling is as valid a motivation as any other.
The issue is the relatively shoddy research here however. There's a number of basic computer errors that makes me question their skills in computers. They're clearly financial guys however, given the rest of their blogs, so I can "forgive" their basic mistakes and chalk it up to a game of telephone. (They probably hired a security research firm, then they are "translating" the results into a form that's most easily recognized by the financial press).
Ideally, they should have released the security research directly rather than this weird... translation + hyperventilating attention-seeking style that they did here. But this is par-for-the-course with regards to financial media unfortunately. Buy the rumor sell the news as they say.
They technically somewhat did on GitHub but this isn't saying much
Don't download any APKs or Zip files from their repo unless you know what you're doing.
I want to know what the F is going on... because this is the second medium I have seen this on. There are a handful of Tiktok videos warning people of getting their credit card or banking info stolen after using Temu. Is this some coordinated stock shakedown, or is it really that bad? It's interesting either way.
Getting your warnings about Chinese spyware from TikTok is like watching for icebergs ahead of the Titanic after it's already cracked in half and on the way to the bottom.
Ya, Tiktok bad. But the complaints aren't about spyware, its about some vulnerability on Temu that seems to be leaking card info to hackers.