DeepSeek, the Chinese AI that scares American tech giants, continues to raise concerns among regulators around the world. South Korea accuses the Chinese company of having shared its users' data with another China-based company: Bytedance, the owner of TikTok.
DeepSeek is banned in South Korea
As reported by South Korean news agency Yonhap, the country's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) was able to confirm "DeepSeek's communication with ByteDance." However, the regulatory agency has yet to "confirm what data was transferred and to what extent.".
Researchers at Security Scorecard also found evidence that DeepSeek is exchanging information with ByteDance's servers. By analyzing the Android app's code, the experts found "multiple direct references to ByteDance-owned services." There is "deep integration with ByteDance's performance monitoring and analytics infrastructure," which allows for "user behavior" monitoring and "device metadata" stealing. In addition, researchers were able to prove that data "was transmitted to domains linked to Chinese state-owned entities.".
Faced with this data sharing, South Korea preferred to ban the DeepSeek app from all download stores. Before its ouster, the app had accumulated more than a million downloads on the App Store and the Play Store. Existing users can continue to use the AI on a web browser. According to the Personal Information Protection Commission, DeepSeek is cooperating with the authorities and acknowledges having violated South Korean privacy laws. The AI will be accessible again in South Korea once it complies with local laws.
DeepSeek in the crosshairs of regulators
Many countries are currently looking into how DeepSeek collects and processes its users' data. This is the case in Italy, through the Italian Data Protection Authority, or Australia, which has chosen to ban DeepSeek from all government systems.
The terms of use of Chinese AI make no secret of the collection of information. DeepSeek does not hide the fact that it vacuums up the personal data of individuals who converse with artificial intelligence. This is why the South Korean authorities recommend that users “exercise caution and avoid entering personal information into the chatbot.”
A political decision?
For Alessandro Fiorentino, data protection expert at Adequacy, the ban on DeepSeek is above all a political decision. According to him, the banning of DeepSeek across the world "illustrates how data protection becomes a pretext for decisions that are primarily geopolitical":
Source: BBC
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