On Friday, October 16, documents made public showed that Texas and the shopping app Temu had settled a lawsuit over how the app handles people’s data. Temu agreed to pay Texas $3 million and to change how it handles Texas shoppers’ personal data. Temu did not admit wrongdoing, and it denied the main allegation about access to people’s devices.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m going to be careful with this one, because a settlement is easy to read as a verdict. It isn’t one.
What Texas alleged
Texas said the Temu app used code that allows an inappropriate level of access to users’ devices. The state also raised a risk that U.S. shoppers’ information could be accessed by entities in China. Those are allegations. Temu denied the device-access claim and said it “has come to an agreement to resolve this matter.” The data risk was described as something that could happen, not as confirmed access.
What Temu agreed to
According to Reuters, Temu will:
- keep Texas shoppers’ personal data on U.S. servers and restrict when it can be sent to China;
- restrict access from China to the U.S. data needed to fulfill a transaction, such as shipping addresses;
- face a potential $8 million penalty for each year it violates the data-security terms;
- run annual independent product-safety testing, and remove and refund products found to contain dangerous chemicals or materials.
The Texas side said it is the first state to resolve claims like this with Temu. Reuters reports Temu still faces several other state lawsuits over alleged unlawful collection of U.S. user data. Those cases are separate and not decided by this settlement. Texas’s office also said Temu had more than 82.4 million active U.S. users as of September 2023.
What this doesn’t tell us
It doesn’t tell us whether the allegations are true. It doesn’t tell us whether any specific person’s data was accessed. And it doesn’t change what Temu or any other app has already collected: the terms are about how data is handled going forward.
What it means for you
This isn’t only a Temu story. Almost any app can ask for access to your location, contacts, photos, camera or microphone, and most of us tap “allow” without a second thought. A few minutes in your phone’s privacy or app-permissions settings will show which apps can see what. If an app doesn’t need something to do its job, you can turn it off.
I also want to be plain about the limits here. ScrubTrace works on the copies of your information that end up on data broker sites. It can’t reach into an app and delete what the app has already collected, and I won’t pretend a removal service can fix that. What you can control is what you allow from here on, and what shows up on broker sites about you.
This is general information, not legal advice.
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