Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced on Tuesday local time that he would file a lawsuit against Chinese online retail platform Temu and its parent company PDD Holdings, accusing them of stealing user data and violating the state's consumer protection laws.
Meyers said that while Temu attracted consumers with ultra-low prices, it made misleading claims about the quality of its products and collected a "shocking amount" of sensitive information without full consent, including users' GPS locations and a list of apps installed on their phones.
The complaint stated that prosecutors were concerned that Temu was subject to relevant Chinese laws, which required the company to hand over the data it held once the government requested it. At the same time, Temu's application code was accused of deliberately circumventing security reviews. Meyers pointed out at the press conference that the app can track users' movements to doctor's offices, libraries, political events and friends' homes, calling this invasion of privacy "extremely broad" and may even constitute "the most serious Consumer Fraud Act infringement in Arizona's history."
In addition to data security, Arizona also cited intellectual property factors to accuse Temu, saying it suspected of plagiarizing the intellectual property of multiple local brands, including the Arizona Cardinals and Arizona State University, "harming businesses in the state and unfairly taking away business." Prior to this, the attorneys general of Kentucky, Nebraska, and Arkansas had launched similar lawsuits against Temu, indicating that state-level enforcement actions against the platform are expanding.
On a broader level, the U.S. federal level has continued to promote legislation in recent years to limit China's influence in the fields of technology and intellectual property. There are related trends in areas ranging from biotechnology and electric vehicles to drones and farmland acquisitions. Meyers called for further federal intervention to strengthen overall protections for consumer data, making clear that the allegations against Temu were "even more serious than some of the concerns surrounding TikTok."
A forensic technical review by the state of Arizona found that the Temu app contained a snippet of code that security experts deemed malware or spyware that could export data from a mobile device without the user's knowledge. The review also pointed out that the current version of the app still retains a large amount of code that had been banned in its predecessor platform version, raising further compliance questions. Meyers called on Arizona residents to immediately delete their Temu accounts, uninstall related apps and scan their devices for malware to reduce potential risks.