The jury is still out if the Chinese Upsart Deepseek is a player or maybe part of a detailed plan from its parent company for short Nvidia and other technology shares. Whatever it is (maybe both?), Deepseek and its large language pattern has made some big waves. Now, it is attracting the attention of data protection guards.
In what seems 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 the Italian data protection authority submitted to a complaint in Links to how Deepseek handles personal data in links 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.
One main detail about Deepseek that many noticed is 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.)
Consumer groups and Italian guards are the first 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. However, the main message was: it is very quickly to say anything about any investigation.
“The services offered in Europe will respect our rules,” regnier noted, 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.”
We have contacted Deepseek about the Italian complaint of the DPA and will update this post after more information is available.
