Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has filed a civil lawsuit against TP-Link, accusing the Wi-Fi router manufacturer of misleading consumers about both the security of its products and its connections to China.
Florida Politics reports that the lawsuit, filed in Polk County as part of Florida’s 10th Judicial Circuit, claims TP-Link falsely told customers that its routers and HomeShield security service covered every security scenario and offered total protection. “Those claims are not true, and we are bringing the lawsuit against TP-Link,” Uthmeier said in a recorded video statement.
Announcing the suit in a post on X, Uthmeier wrote that “TP-Link sold Floridians the digital front door to their home network while misrepresenting how secure it was, how separated the company was from China, and what could happen to their data.”
Uthmeier explains, “Chinese state-sponsored hackers exploited TP-Link routers sitting in American living rooms. Many of those models cannot update themselves automatically, and TP-Link has stopped supporting them.”
The lawsuit also challenges TP-Link’s public claims about its corporate structure and manufacturing. The company has said it split from China and builds its U.S. products in Vietnam. Uthmeier disputed that directly: “They also told Floridians they had split from China and that they build U.S. products in Vietnam. That is fiction. Research and manufacturing remain rooted in China. Less than one percent of the parts in that Vietnam plant actually come from Vietnam.”
“We will not allow families to be misled into handing their personal data to the Chinese Communist Party,” Uthmeier said.
Through the lawsuit, Uthmeier is seeking an injunction against TP-Link, restitution for Florida consumers, and penalties under state law. “We are seeking an injunction, restitution for Florida consumers and the penalties under Florida law,” he said.
Breitbart News previously reported that Uthmeier has led the charge in a shareholder lawsuit against the New York Times that claims its anti-Israel bias has hurt investors:
“We recently announced that that we’re investigating this and looking into a situation where they had to make countless numbers of retractions in certain reporting. On today’s petition, I want to make clear it’s not a lawsuit or challenge to any certain article or editorial discretion. Businesses certainly have First Amendment rights, Uthmeier said, explaining that the lawsuit is about “corporate governance” at its core.
“But when you are a publicly traded company, and the New York Times is, you have legal responsibilities and duties to your shareholders. And we saw some very dangerous trends that appear to call into credibility the sound business sense of what that company is doing,” Uthmeier said, providing some examples of the bias by detailing “72 recent errors where the company admitted in its own correction column, in a very single coverage area in just eight months, all pro-Hamas style reporting that had to be clawed back as incorrect.”
Read more at Florida Politics here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.