Italian DPA: ‘data of millions of Italians at risk because of DeepSeek’

Many praise the potential of DeepSeek; the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali (GPDP) is concerned that the newest AI chatbot may pose a risk for millions of Italians.
The Italian data protection authority (DPA) has sent a request for information to Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, the companies that are responsible for providing the chatbot service both on the world wide web and the app.
The GPDP has asked the two companies and their affiliates to confirm what personal data is collected, from what sources, for what purposes, what legal basis the companies use for their data collecting and processing, and whether personal information is stored on servers in China or not.
In addition, the privacy regulator asked the companies what type of information is used to train the large language model (LLM) and, in the event that personal data is collected by means of scraping, to clarify how registered users have been or are informed about the processing of their data.
DeepSeek has 20 days to respond to the GPDP’s inquiry request.
In recent days, DeepSeek has caused quite a stir in the chip sector and on the financial markets. The company claims to have created a chatbot that is similar to Western alternatives like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. It even became the most downloaded app on Apple’s App Store in the United States.
DeepSeek managed to do so for only a fraction of the costs. Instead of the hundreds of millions that companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta spent on developing their LLM, DeepSeek says it spent less than 6 million euros.
Experts are interpreting this as a sign that development costs for AI chatbots are dropping rapidly. Apparently, less powerful and expensive chips are needed to create an LLM. This caused NVIDIA to slump 17% or $600 billion of its market value on Monday.
In the following days, chip markets were able to slightly restore their losses.
Experts are warning users to be careful about what information they reveal to DeepSeek. As with other chatbots, it remains unclear exactly what DeepSeek does with the information that is entered. Therefore, users should be careful not to submit sensitive data.
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