The jury is still out if the Chinese Upsart Deepseek is a player or part of a detailed plan from his parent company for short Nvidia and other technology shares. Whatever it is (maybe both?), Deepseek and its large language pattern have made some great waves. And now, it is attracting the attention of the data protection guards.
Today the Irish Data Protection Commission confirmed to Techcrunch that it has sent a deepseek note asking for details of how citizens’ data in Ireland are processed by the company. “The Data Protection Commission (DPC) wrote to Deepseek by seeking information on data processing carried out regarding data entities in Ireland,” a spokesman said.
The letter from the DPA of Ireland was sent less than 24 hours after the data protection supervisor in Italy sent a similar note to the company. Deepseek still does not respond to each request publicly. However, its mobile app no longer appears in both Apple and Apple App in Italy.
The Italian mass seemed to be the first major movement by such a guard as Deepseek went positively viral in recent days, Euroconsumers, a coalition of consumer groups in Europe, has filed a complaint about the Italian data protection authority over How Deepseek handles personal data related to GDPR, Europe’s data protection regulatory framework.
The Italian DPA confirmed today that it then wrote to Deepseek with a request for information. “A Rischio of Dati knows million knows people in Italy,” she notes. (“The data of millions of Italians are in danger.”) Deepseek has 20 days to respond.
Two main details about Deepseek that many noticed are that the service has been done and operates outside China. According to his privacy policy, this includes the information and data that Deepseek also collects stores, which is also placed in its place.
Deepseek also briefly records in its policy that when transferring data to China from the place where Deepseek is being used, it does so “in accordance with the requirements of the laws applicable to data protection.”
But Euroconsumers – the organization that brought a successful case against Grok last year on how she used data to train her – and the Italian DPA wants more details.
Addressing Hangzhou Deepseek Artificial Intelligence and Peking Deepseek Artificial Intelligence, the Italian DPA said he wants to know what personal data have been collected, which sources, and for what purposes – including information to train his system he – together With what is legal the basis is for processing. He also wants more details on those servers in China.
Further, she writes in her request for information, wants to know “if personal data is collected through online scraping activities”, as users who are “registered and those who are not registered have been or have been or are informed about the processing of their data. “
MLEX news outlets notes that Euroconsumers also stressed that there are no details about how Deepseek protects or limits juveniles to its services, from age verification to how it treats juvenile data.
(Deepseek’s age policy notes that it is not intended for users under the age of 18, though it does not provide a way to implement it. For those between the ages of 14 and 18 an adult.)
Euroconsumers and Italian guards represent the first attempt to make a move against Deepseek. They may not be the last, though the chase may not be so fast.
Earlier today, Deepseek was a major topic at a press conference on the European Commission. Thomas Regnier, a spokesman for the Commission on Technology Sovereignty, was asked if there are concerns at the European level over Deepseek regarding security, intimacy and censorship. For now, the main message seemed to be: it is very soon to say anything about any investigation.
“Services offered in Europe will respect our rules,” regnier noted in an answer to a question about data privacy, adding that the act of it applies to all services offered in the region.
He refused to say whether Deepseek, in EU assessment, respected those rules or not. He was then asked if the censoring of the topics that are politically sensitive in China fell behind the rules of free speech in Europe and whether this deserved an investigation. “These are very early stages, I’m not talking about an investigation yet,” Regnier quickly said in response. “Our frame is strong enough to address possible issues if they are here.”
Techcrunch questions sent to ICO in the UK regarding Deepseek received a similar answer: Deepseek will, in fact, undergo the same control as any other Genai developer. But there are no further action yet.
“He and the determination developers and determiners need to ensure that people have significant, concise and easily accessible information about the use of their personal data and have clear and effective processes to enable people to exercise rights their information, ”said a spokesman. “We will continue to engage with the stakeholders to promote effective transparency measures without leaving actions when ignoring our regulatory expectations.”
In the meantime, can new routes of interrogation be opened about regulatory areas such as copyright and IP protection?
Many have been amazed at how Deepseek’s existence seems to challenge assumptions about the current costs of training and operating a LLM or a generator service of it: its cheaper infrastructure and cost basis undermine the idea that the basic construction And the direction of the generating applications should cost whether the wealth in the chips, the use of the data center and the energy consumption.
But recently, some have begun to ask questions about all this. Microsoft and Openai say there seems to be evidence that she was partially trained in “distillations” by their owner models. There will be a strange irony in this if it proves to be true – given the many legal and others that have been shaken around how some LLM builders are suspected to have considered intellectual property and copyright.
We have contacted Deepseek about the Italian complaint of the DPA and will update this post after more information is available. Meanwhile, Deepseek’s apps have now been withdrawn from the leading Italian app stores, though it seems to be still live online in the country.
Updated with further details on regulatory responses, legal issues and service status in Italy.
