Immediately on the European market, and immediately in the crosshairs of the Italian authority in charge of personal data. As it did in 2023 for ChatGPT, the Italian data protection authority, the equivalent of the CNIL in the country, has already looked into DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot that is shaking up the AI giants.
And it is giving it twenty days to answer these questions, we learned in a press release on Tuesday, January 28. The Guarantor is asking the Chinese chatbot for details, because the generative AI application potentially poses risks to the data of millions of people in Italy.
Sources, purpose, legal basis, information…
It explains that it has “sent a request for information to Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, the companies that provide the DeepSeek chatbot service (…)”. Specifically, the Garante wants to know "what personal data is collected" when an Italian user uses DeepSeek, whether on the website or on the application.
But that's not all. It also asks for information on the sources of training, the purposes of data collection, the legal basis chosen for the processing (of personal data) and the location of the servers where the data collected by the chatbot is stored. The authority also wants to know how users registered and not registered with the (chatbot) service were or are informed about the processing of their data. DeepSeek, which has become one of the most popular free apps in the world, has until February 17 to respond to the requests of the Italian authority. As a reminder, in 2023, ChatGPT was suspended for a month, for failing to meet the expectations of the Guarantor.
Source: Press release from the Guarantor of January 28, 2025
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