The jury is still outside the fact that the Chinese Ia Upstart Deepseek is a turning point or part of a plan developed by its mother society of hedge fund with Nvidia short films and other technological titles. Whatever can it be (perhaps both?), Deepseek and its great linguistic model have made important waves. And now, he is attracting the attention of data protection guard dogs.
Today the Irish data protection commission has confirmed Techcrunch to have sent a note to Deepseek which requires details on how citizens’ data in Ireland are processed by the company. “The Data Protection Commission (DPC) wrote about Deepseek which requires information on the processing of data conducted in relation to data of data in Ireland,” said a spokesperson. They refused to answer further questions.
The letter of the Irish DPA has been sent less than 24 hours after the data protection dog in Italy sent a similar note to the company. Deepseek has not yet responded to both requests publicly. However, his mobile app no longer appears both in the Google App Stores and Apple in Italy.
The Italian move seemed to be the first important move by one of these guard dogs since Deepseek has become positively viral in recent days; Euroconsumer, a coalition of groups of consumers in Europe, has filed a complaint to the Italian data protection authority relating to how Deepseek manages personal data in relation to the GDPR, the regulatory framework for data protection in Europe.
The Italian DPA confirmed today that he later wrote to Deepseek with a request for information. “A renovation of millions of people in Italy,” he observes. (“The data of millions of Italians are at risk.”) Deepseek is 20 days to answer.
Two key details on Deepseek that many have noticed are that the service is made and operates outside China. According to his privacy policy, this includes the information and data that Deepseek collects and shops, which are also hosted in his country of origin.
Deepseek also briefly detects in its policy that when transfers data to China from the country where Deepseek is used, it does so “in accordance with the requirements of applicable data protection laws”.
But Euroconsumer – The organization that brought a success case against Grok last year on how he used the data to train his Ai – and the Italian DPA wants more details.
By contacting Hangzhou deepseek artificial intelligence and Beijing Deepseek artificial intelligence, the Italian DPA has said that he wants to know what personal data are collected, from what sources and for what purposes – including what information is used to train his system AI – together with what that Legal the base is for processing. He also wants more details on those servers in China.
In addition, he writes in his request for information, he wants to know “in the event that personal data is collected through web scraping activities”, such as users who are “registered and those who have not been registered in the service were or are informed on the elaboration of their data.
The MLEX store notes that Euroconsumer has also highlighted that there are no details on how Deepseek protects or limits minors on its services, from verification of age to how it manages minors data.
(The age of Deepsek’s age observes that it is not intended for users under the age of 18, although it does not provide a way to apply it. For those aged an adult.)
Euroconsumer and the Italian guard dog represent the first effort to make a move against Deepseek. They may not be the last, although follow-ups may not be so quick.
Today, Deepseek was a main topic in a press conference at the European Commission. To Thomas Regnier, spokesman for the Commission for technological sovereignty, was asked if there are European concerns compared to Deepsek relating to safety, privacy and censorship. For now, however, the main message seemed to be: it is too early to say something about any investigation.
“The services offered in Europe will respect our rules”, observed Regnier in an answer to a question on the privacy of the data, adding that the artificial intelligence act applies to all artificial intelligence services offered in the region.
He refused to say if Deepseek, according to EU’s estimate, has respected these rules or not. He was therefore asked if the censorship of the app on politically sensitive topics in China had not remained in difficulty in Europe and if this deserved an investigation. “These are very initial phases, I’m not yet talking about an investigation,” said Regnier quickly in response. “Our framework is solid enough to face potential problems if they are here.”
Techcrunch questions sent to the ic in the United Kingdom on Deepseek has received a similar response: Deepseek, in fact, will be subject to the same control of any other genai developer. But there is still no further actions.
“Generative artificial intelligence developers and distributors must make sure people have significant, concise and easily accessible information on the use of their personal data and have clear and effective processes to allow people to exercise their information rights,” he said A spokesman. “We will continue to engage with the interested parties on the promotion of effective transparency measures, without avoiding acting when our regulatory expectations are ignored”.
In the meantime, they could open new roads of regulatory questions in areas such as copyright and the protection of Pi?
Many have amazed how the very existence of Deepseek seems to challenge the conditions on the actual costs of training and manage an LLM or a service of the generative: its cheaper infrastructure and the basis of the costs undermine the idea that the construction of Fundamental foundations and the applications of Ai Generative in execution must cost fortunes in chips, use of the data center and energy consumption.
But more recently, some have started to raise questions about all this. Microsoft and Openai say that there seems to be a proof that it has been partially trained on “distillations” by their owner models. There would be an extraordinary irony in this if it turned out to be true – given the many legal and others’ dramas that have turbinated like some LLM manufacturers presumably considered intellectual property and copyright.
We contacted Deepseek as regards the Italian DPA complaint and we will update this post as more information will be available. In the meantime, Deepseek apps have now been extracted from the main Italian apps, even if it seems to be still live online in the country.
Updated with further details on the regulatory answers, legal issues and the status of the service in Italy.
