Amid the furor over TikTok’s one-day ban in the US and subsequent, though belated, return to the Apple and Google app stores, Western governments in particular have grown just as concerned with what happens to the data fed into DeepSeek, the world’s new AI darling from China.
Now South Korea’s government agency, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), has told Yonhap News Agency that they’ve found a link between DeepSeek and ByteDance, but they’re not sure exactly what user data is being sent. Or to whom, or what for.
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bruised egos and backdoor whispers
As the BBC reported, a US cybersecurity company alleged potential data sharing between ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, and DeepSeek earlier this month. Given that DeepSeek hasn’t been available for even two months, it’s a lot of drama in a short amount of time.
You’ve had to have been living under a rock (one without Wi-Fi service) to have not heard about DeepSeek-V3 in the past month.
It’s the Chinese firm that stood up OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the world stage by producing a similarly free generative AI for a fraction of the investment that went into the West’s leading AIs, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini, and being pretty damn good, too. Its results compared, in some cases, favorably to ChatGPT.
And because it wasn’t done upstaging OpenAI, it took aim at the American firm’s AI image generator DALL-E with an AI image generator of its own, Janus-Pro, that also gives DALL-E a run for its money while costing far less to produce.
DeepSeek had been downloaded over a million times, per the BBC, before it was yanked from South Korea’s Apple App Stores and Google Play Store this past weekend. Curiously though, those who already had downloaded it can still access the app, and access to the web browser version of DeepSeek remains uninterrupted, according to the BBC.
“The Chinese startup appointed legal representatives last week in South Korea and had acknowledged partially neglecting considerations of the country’s data protection law,” according to the PIPC, via Reuters.
“Once improvements are made in accordance with the country’s privacy law,” says the PIPC, the app will return to South Korea’s app stores. Still, it’s a bad look for yet another Chinese company to run afoul of Western privacy concerns.
From TikTok to DJI, the drone company, seemingly any and every Chinese tech company is under suspicion by Western governments and their allies right now. As TechRadar summarized, numerous countries are banning or investigating DeepSeek.
If DeepSeek is sharing user data in skeevy, sketchy ways, then it’s right to look into it. If only these same countries doing the investigating took that same approach when they themselves do it, then that would really be something.