The Sunshine State could once again be at the forefront of America's battle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This is no spy balloon, nor is it Chinese officials buying up land in Florida's farm belt, but something just as troubling — Temu.
The CCP-linked e-commerce app has more than 100 million users in the United States, and while it may seem like a benign way to purchase cheap products, do not be fooled.
According to National Security Institute (NSI) senior fellow Andy Keiser, "Temu and its parent company PDD Holdings, are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party and China's national and cybersecurity laws, which enable the Chinese military and intelligence service the potential to use the Temu application for propaganda purposes, and to steal data, manipulate data or conduct surveillance, as well as to cause disruption such as disabling millions of Americans' phones during a conflict or ahead of a major development like the Chinese crossing the Taiwan Strait."
To make matters worse, an article from Yahoo claims Temu gains access to "literally everything on your phone," bypassing "phone security systems to read a user's private messages, make changes to the phone's settings and track notifications."
This is not the first time Temu and its parent company, PDD Holdings, have been accused of spying on its users. Just last year, Temu's sister company, Pinduoduo (also owned by PDD Holdings), was kicked off Google's app store for malware, exploiting user data and surveillance. While the engineers and product managers working on Pinduoduo were disbanded, most of them were transferred to work at Temu.
We must be clear, the CCP and its cohorts are rewarding these cyber criminals with new jobs so they can further collect and share our personal information. In fact, a new report by the New York Post revealed that PDD Holdings employs several former CCP officials in top executive positions.
Temu's true colors are showing, and while the company claims to be growing its American roots by opening a sham headquarters in Boston, this is a guise for what Temu really wants with America: our data.
Luckily for us Floridians, our leaders are aware of the threat the CCP poses. On the state level, Florida passed several bills to counteract the CCP's malign influence, including a ban on Confucius Institutes, restrictions on Chinese land purchases near military bases and critical infrastructure, and protections for Floridians' health care data.
Florida led the fight against the CCP and its influence once, and we must do it again. Temu must be banned from all government devices and the state must take action to protect consumers and residents from China's efforts to surveil and exploit our data.
Beijing may think its deceptive practices go unnoticed by Floridians, but Temu is running on borrowed time in the Sunshine State.
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Armando Ibarra is a government affairs executive and policy adviser for companies, organizations and leaders in the U.S. and Latin America. He serves as a senior adviser to the Fundación para la Democracia Panamericana and as Chair of the Miami Young Republicans.
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