The Italian news agency DPA has asked DeepSeek for information about the processing of data on millions of Italians. The Chinese startup has 20 days to respond.
The Italian news agency DPA has asked DeepSeek for information about the processing of data on millions of Italians. The Chinese startup has 20 days to respond.
This appears to be the first serious step from the relevant supervisory authorities after DeepSeek gained widespread publicity in recent days: a coalition of European consumer groups, Euroconsumers, filed a complaint with the Italian Data Protection Authority (DPA) regarding how DeepSeek processes personal data under the GDPR, the European data protection regulatory framework, TechCrunch reports .
Today, the Italian news agency DPA confirmed that it had subsequently requested information from DeepSeek. “The data of millions of Italians is at risk,” the request said.
One of the key features of DeepSeek is that the service is built and operated in China. According to its privacy policy, this includes the information and data that DeepSeek collects and stores, which is also hosted in its home country.
DeepSeek also briefly notes in its policy that when it transfers data to China from a country where DeepSeek is used, it does so “in accordance with the requirements of applicable data protection law.”
Addressing Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, the Italian DPA said it wanted to know what personal data was collected, from what sources and for what purposes, including what information was used to train the AI system, and what the legal basis for the processing was. It also wanted more details about these servers in China.
In addition, in his information request, he writes that he wants to know "if personal data is collected through web scraping," how users who are "registered and not registered on the service have been informed or made aware of the processing of their data."
Euroconsumers also highlighted that there are no details on how DeepSeek protects or restricts minors on its services, from age verification to how it processes minors' data.
DeepSeek's age policy states that it is not intended for users under the age of 18, although it does not provide a way to enforce it. For those between the ages of 14 and 18, DeepSeek suggests that these younger users read the privacy policy with an adult.
DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence lab funded largely by High-Flyer Capital Management, recently gained popularity after its chatbot rose to the top of the Apple App Store charts .
DeepSeek's language models, which were trained using efficient computational methods, have led many analysts and technologists in the West to wonder whether the US will be able to maintain its lead in the AI race and whether demand for AI chips will persist.
This excitement has caused stock prices in technology companies to fall , including top graphics processor manufacturer Nvidia, and Mark Zuckerberg hastened to announce that Meta plans to invest $60 billion in AI development by 2025 .
The hype around DeepSeek became so great that even monobank co-founder Oleg Gorohovsky and the head of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, Mykhailo Fedorov, wrote cryptic, laconic posts about the startup. The latter later published a more detailed post on Telegram.
dev.ua did a detailed analysis of how DeepSeek managed to outperform its competitors .
DeepSeek has also released a new set of multimodal AI models , which the Chinese company claims can outperform OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 image generator.
ChatGPT is reducing the cost of using the Plus version due to the popularity of the Chinese DeepSeek.
