The jury is still outside the fact that the Chinese Ia Upstart Deepseek is a turning point or perhaps 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. Now, he is attracting the attention of data protection guard dogs.
In what seems to be the first important move from one of these guard dogs since Deepseek has become positively viral in recent days, Euroconsumer, a coalition of groups of consumers in Europe, has conducted with the Italian data protection authority who filed a complaint relating to the way 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.
A key detail on Deepseek that many have noticed is the service and works 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.)
The groups of consumers and the Italian guard dog are the first 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. Yet the main message was: it’s too early to say something about any investigation.
“The services offered in Europe will respect our rules”, observed Regnier, adding that the law AI 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.”
We contacted Deepseek as regards the Italian DPA complaint and we will update this post as more information will be available.
