DeepSeek privacy concerns have led to investigations being opened in both the US and Europe, and seen the app removed from the App Store in Italy. It seems likely the same will happen in other countries.
Italian’s privacy regulator questioned whether the app complied with GDPR, a tough privacy law that applies across 30 different countries …
A quick recap on DeepSeek
DeepSeek is an AI chatbot developed in China, and which posted benchmarks indicating that its performance was comparable to the world’s best existing models. Experts quickly verified the claims, expressing shock that China was able to achieve this at a fraction of the development cost of US models, and running locally on very modestly-specced PCs.
The app quickly climbed to the #1 slot in Apple’s App Store.
It also led to fears that US AI companies may be over-valued. It had previously been thought that the very high hardware costs required to develop LLMs meant companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta were unlikely to face competition from smaller businesses, and that Nvidia GPUs would continue to be in extremely high demand. Those assumptions have now been thrown into question, leading to a slump in the stock price of a number of companies.
DeepSeek privacy concerns
Most AI chatbots have privacy policies which allow them to learn from our interactions with them, raising obvious privacy concerns.
The fact that DeepSeek is Chinese owned has raised additional fears about how it collects and uses personal data. Reuters reports that Italy’s privacy watchdog has asked the company a series of questions about GDPR compliance, and has given it 20 days to respond.
Italy’s data protection authority said it was seeking answers from Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) model DeepSeek on its use of personal data. The Italian regulator, which is also known as the Garante, said it wanted to know what personal data is collected, from which sources, for what purposes, on what legal basis, and whether it is stored in China.
Additionally, US officials are investigating the app.
US officials are looking at the national security implications of the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said […] The National Security Council is reviewing the app’s implications.
DeepSeek removed from the App Store in Italy
Following the Garante’s questions, DeepSeek is no longer available in either Apple or Google’s app stores in the country. It’s not clear whether this action was taken by DeepSeek or by the app store companies.
The Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek could not be accessed on Wednesday in Apple and Google app stores in Italy, the day after the country’s data protection authority requested information on its use of personal data.
Reuters reports that Ireland’s privacy regulator has also asked similar questions.
GDPR applies to all 27 European Union countries, plus three EAA ones, meaning that companies operating in a total of 30 countries are required to comply. A lack of satisfactory response to the questions asked by Italy and Ireland could potentially see the app banned in all these countries.
9to5Mac’s Take
The same privacy concerns apply to most generative AI services. Given their very similar privacy policies, it seems the only difference here is that US companies are trusted more than Chinese ones. The best advice is never to include personal data in your chatbot requests.
Apple Intelligence is a notable exception to this: the service does not use your data for training purposes. Additionally, Apple’s deal with OpenAI means that ChatGPT is also banned from doing so when you access it as a fallback to Apple Intelligence. For this reason, accessing ChatGPT via Siri is the safest way to use it.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
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