Nebraska AG Sues Temu Over Alleged Consumer Protection Violations
The complaint alleges a host of consumer protection violations, including misrepresentation of goods, greenwashing, embedding illegal malware into consumers' personal devices and sharing Nebraskans' data with the Chinese Communist Party.
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The crux of the complaint is centered around consumers' data. Hilgers alleges in the complaint that Temu has illegally 'siphoned' personal information about Nebraskan consumers, leaving them at risk. Hilgers said Temu's famously low-cost products 'come with a one-two punch to Americans.'
'Temu's app operates as malware; its code is designed to exfiltrate an enormous amount of sensitive information, from access to a user's microphone, pictures and messages, to information sufficient to track their movements,' Hilgers alleged in the complaint. 'This sensitive information that is unlawfully exfiltrated to Temu naturally flows to its powerful patron—the Chinese Communist Party. In the United States's great power competition with China, Temu presents yet another way in which China can extract and exploit information about Americans for its own purposes.'
Temu was founded in China and is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings, but its headquarters are now located in Boston.
A spokesperson for Temu said the claims made in the complaint are untrue.
'The allegations in the Nebraska Attorney General's lawsuit are without merit and appear to be a rehash of misinformation circulated online, much of it originating from a short-seller. We categorically deny the allegations and will vigorously defend ourselves against them,' the spokesperson told Sourcing Journal via email.
This isn't the first time Temu has come under fire for the way it handles consumer data; in June 2024, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin announced that the state had filed a lawsuit against Temu, calling it 'a data-theft business that sells goods online as a means to an end.'
Last year, Republican members of Congress asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to pursue further information about Temu and its business practices.
Throughout the rest of the complaint, Hilgers goes on to allege that the means by which Temu entices Nebraskan consumers are also unlawful. He alleges that the company uses greenwashing to mislead consumers and that it deceives consumers with its local warehousing business model, leading them to believe that they are purchasing from local businesses.
'Temu misleadingly uses the 'local' tag for products shipped from warehouses located in the United States,' Hilgers contended. 'These products could originate from foreign countries, such as China, but Temu passes them off as local goods because the products are temporarily stored for distribution in the United States.'
In this section of the complaint, Hilgers is referring to the fact that Temu has been making a push for what it refers to as 'local warehouses.' These warehouses, located in markets of interest, like the U.S. and the EU, make it possible for the company to get products to consumers' doorsteps faster than sending them directly from China. While it has looked to onboard U.S. sellers, many of the sellers who use these local warehouses are based in China.
Hilgers further said that the platform is 'awash in products infringing copyrights and other intellectual property.'
In the complaint, the attorney general states that Nebraska believes Temu is in violation of multiple state laws, including its Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act and its Consumer Protection Act. Hilgers asks the judge overseeing the case to enjoin Temu from 'continuing to engage in such unlawful acts and practices' and to award affected Nebraskan consumers compensation.
Hilgers said the lawsuit is intended to shield the state's residents from unlawful company conduct.
'Temu is putting Nebraskans' privacy at risk and running a platform rife with deceptive listings, unlawful promotional practices, and products that rip off Nebraska brands and creations,' he said in a statement. 'Our office will hold Temu accountable for its exploitation of Nebraska consumers, brands and creators and fight hard for honesty and safety in the online marketplace.'
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Los Angeles Times
4 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Social Security turns 90 this week. Republicans are trying to keep it from reaching 100
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a clear mind about the value of Social Security on Aug. 14, 1935, the day he signed it into law. 'The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure,' he said in the Oval Office. 'We can never insure 100 per cent of the population against 100 per cent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against ... poverty-ridden old age.' He called it a 'cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.' FDR envisioned further programs to bring relief to the needy and healthcare for all Americans. Some of that happened during the following nine decades, but the structure is still incomplete. And now, as Social Security observes the 90th anniversary of that day, the program faces a crisis. If there are doubts about whether Social Security will survive long enough to observe its centennial, those have less to do with its fiscal challenges, the solutions of which are certainly within the economic reach of the richest nation on Earth. They have more to do with partisan politics, specifically the culmination of a decades-long GOP project to dismantle the most successful, and the most popular, government assistance program in American history. From a distance, the raids on the program's customer service infrastructure and the security of its data mounted by Elon Musk's DOGE earlier this year looked somewhat random. Fueled by abject ignorance about how the program worked and what its data meant, DOGE set in place plans to cut the program's staff by 7,000, or 12 percent, and to close dozens of field offices serving Social Security applicants and beneficiaries. This at a time when the Social Security case load is higher than ever and staffing had already approached a 50-year low. This might have been billed as an effort to impose 'efficiency' on the system. But 'a more accurate description,' writes Monique Morrissey of the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, 'is sabotage.' That has been conservatives' long-term plan — make interactions with Social Security more involved, more difficult and more time-consuming in order to make it seem ever less relevant to average Americans' lives. Once that happened, the public would be softened up to accept a privatized retirement system. Get the inefficient government off the backs of the people, the idea goes, so Wall Street can saddle up. George W. Bush's privatization plan, indeed, was conceived and promoted by Wall Street bankers, who thirsted for access to the trillions of dollars passing through the system's hands. This was never much of a secret, but it simmered beneath the surface. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at a July 30 event sponsored by Breitbart News, said the quiet part out loud. Referring to a private savings account program enacted as part of the GOP budget reconciliation bill Trump signed July 4, Bessent said, 'In a way, it is a back door for privatizing Social Security.' The private accounts are to be jump-started with $1,000 deposits for children born this year through 2028, to be invested in stock index mutual funds; families can add up to $5,000 annually in after-tax income, with withdrawals beginning when the child reaches 18, though in some cases incurring a stiff penalty. I asked the Treasury Department for a clarification of Bessent's remark, but didn't receive a reply. Bessent, however, did try to walk the statement back via a post on X in which he stated that the Trump accounts are 'an additive benefit for future generations, which will supplement the sanctity of Social Security's guaranteed payments.' Sorry, Mr. Secretary, no sale. You're the one who talked about 'privatizing Social Security' at the Breitbart event. You're stuck with it. Plainly, an 'additive' benefit would have nothing to do with Social Security. How it would 'supplement the sanctity' of Social Security benefits isn't apparent from Bessent's statement, or the law. Still, we can parse out the implications based on the long history of conservative attacks on the program. In 1983, the libertarian Cato Journal published a paper by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, two policy analysts at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, titled 'Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy—i.e., for privatizing Social Security. From Lenin they drew the idea of mobilizing the working class to undermine existing capitalist structures. Cato's 'Leninist' strategy paper explicitly advocated encouraging workers to opt out of Social Security by promising them a payroll tax reduction if they put the money in a private account. IRAs, the authors asserted, would acclimate Americans to entrusting their retirements to a privatized system. They advocated an increase in the maximum annual contribution and its tax deductibility. 'The public would gradually become more familiar with the private option,' they wrote. 'If that did happen, it would be far easier than it is now to adopt the private plan as their principal source of old-age insurance and retirement income.' In other words, it would provide a backdoor for privatizing Social Security. (Germanis has since emerged as a cogent critic of conservative economics. Butler served at Heritage until 2014 and is currently a scholar in residence at the Brookings Institution; he told me in March that he still believes in parallel systems of private retirement savings as we have today, but as 'add on' savings rather than a substitute for Social Security.) Cato, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, has never relinquished its quest to privatize Social Security; the notion still occupies pride of place on the institution's web page devoted to the program. In 2005, when I attended a two-day conference on the topic at Cato's Washington headquarters, Michael D. Tanner, then the chair of Cato's Social Security task force, explained that Cato wasn't concerned so much with the system's fiscal and economic issues as with its politics. Its goal, he stated frankly, was to unmake FDR's New Deal. 'This is about whether we redefine a relationship between individuals and government that we've had since 1935,' he told me. 'We say that what was done was wrong then, and it's wrong now. Our position is that people need to be responsible for their own lives.' Yet forcing dramatic change on a program so widely trusted and appreciated is a heavy lift. That's why Republicans have tried to downplay their intentions. Back in 2019, for instance, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) talked about the need to hold discussions about Social Security's future 'behind closed doors.' Secrecy was essential, Ernst said, 'so we're not being scrutinized by this group or the other, and just have an open and honest conversation about what are some of the ideas that we have for maintaining Social Security in the future.' As I observed at the time, that was a giveaway: The only time politicians take actions behind closed doors is when they know the results will be massively unpopular. Raising taxes on the rich to pay for Social Security benefits? That discussion can be held in the open, because the option is decisively favored in opinion polls. Cut benefits? That needs to be done in secret, because Americans overwhelmingly oppose it. Curiously, Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to think that attacking Social Security is an electoral winner. Possibly they've lost sight of the program's importance to the average American. Among Social Security beneficiaries age 65 and older, 39% of men and 44% of women receive half their income or more from Social Security. In the same cohort, 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. Notwithstanding that reality, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently asserted that delays in sending out Social Security checks or bank deposits would be no big deal. 'Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month,' Lutnick said. 'My mother-in-law, who's 94 — she wouldn't call and complain.... She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month.' He claimed that only 'fraudsters' would complain. I had a different take. Mine was that even a 24-hour delay in benefit payments would have a cataclysmic fallout for the Republican Party. It would be front-page news coast to coast. There would be nowhere for them to hide. While bringing misery to millions of Americans, a delay — which would be unprecedented since the first checks went out in 1940 — would be a gift for Democrats, if they knew how to use it. Where will we go from here? The current administration has already done damage to this critically-important program. An acting commissioner Trump installed briefly interfered with the enrollment process for infants born in Maine—an important procedure to ensure that government benefits continue to flow to their families—because the state's governor had pushed back against Trump in public. In July, the newly-appointed Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, allowed a false and flagrantly political email to go out to beneficiaries and to be posted on the program's website implying that the budget reconciliation bill relieved most seniors of federal income taxes on their benefits. It did nothing of the kind. To the extent that Social Security may face a fiscal reckoning in the next decade, the most effective fix is well-understood by those familiar with the program's structure. It's removing the income cap on the payroll tax, which tops out this year at $176,100 in wage income. Up to that point, wages are taxed at 12.4%, split evenly between workers and their employers. Above the ceiling, the tax is zero. Remove the cap, and make capital gains, dividends and interest income subject to the tax, and Social Security will remain fully solvent into the foreseeable future. Trump and his fellow Republicans don't seem to understand how most Americans view Social Security: as an 'entitlement,' not because they think they're getting something for nothing, but because they know they've paid for it all their working lives. As much as the system's foes would like it to go away, as long as the rest of us remain vigilant against efforts to 'redefine a relationship between individuals and government' established in 1935, we will be able to celebrate its 100th anniversary 10 years from now, in 2035.
The Hill
4 minutes ago
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Billy Long's IRS ouster follows clashes with Treasury
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The Hill
4 minutes ago
- The Hill
Trump wields funding card in fight with DC
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'I can see that being an anomaly in a [continuing resolution],' said a Republican strategist, who suggested that Trump could also request more federal oversight of Washington's Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in exchange for funding to hire more police. 'You're working within the confines with what will probably be a' continuing resolution, the strategist said of the expectation that Congress will need to pass a stopgap funding measure to avoid a government shutdown. 'You could do it via a handshake agreement,' the strategist added, referring to concessions Bowser would make in exchange for more federal funding. Bowser 'already opened the door' to a potential deal with the White House, the strategist noted, by acknowledging in a recent statement that beefing up policing in some parts of the city could be a good idea. 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