- South Korea Privacy Watchdog has temporarily stopped downloads of Deepseek
- Deepseek cooperates with the authorities to get compatible
- Latest in a series of privacy issues raised about AI -Chatbots
South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) has temporarily stopped new downloads of Chinese-owned AI Chatbot Deepseek.
Reports from Techcrunch Confirm that the app is still in progress for those who have already installed it and that the decision will not affect the use of the app – but new downloads will be stopped until the Chinese company complies with Korean Privacy Laws.
South Korea is not the first to ban new downloads of chatbot, where the model disappears from the Italian App Store and Google Play Store at the end of January 2025, after the country’s data Watchdog filed a privacy complaint and asked for information on how Deepseek handles users’ personal information.
Recurring concerns
Deepseek has since appointed a local representative to work with the authorities in South Korea, but the Data Protection Agency has said it is strongly adviser ‘current users to relinquish.
The restriction is temporary, while PIPC assesses the use and storage of data from Deepseek, but the agency confirms the model will be available for download when compatible.
PIPC found that Deepseek had transferred data from South Korean users to Bytedance – Tikkok’s parent company. Tiktok, which many will remember well – was briefly banned in the United States over privacy and security.
Deepseek is not the first AI model under the control of concerns for privacy. The nature of large language models is a bit of a privacy mining field as they scrape every corner of the Internet to data to train their models – without the consent of owners/writers/creators of the media they use.
Further than this, Openai has never asked people for permission to use their data, and it is not possible for a person to get confirmation of what data has been used or stored – or for them to be deleted. This contradicts an important facet of GDPR laws that protect the right to be forgotten and should guarantee individuals the ability to have their personal data deleted upon request.
Like the new child on the block, Deepseek in the limelight is for several reasons -and there have been legitimate concerns about how the platform collects and stores your personal information such as your E -mail address, name and date of birth as well as the data you enter in Chatbot, And the technical information on the device you use, such as IP address, OS, etc.
Using AI safe
So is Deepseek safe to use? And can it be used while maintaining your privacy? Well, there are things you can do to mitigate the risk.
As with all LLMs, if you are concerned about data protection, it is probably not a good idea to use AI. LLMS Scratch data from the Internet without permission and will use your interactions to add to the pool of data with which the model is trained and it is not something you can opt out, Deepseek included.
If you are in South Korea or Italy and still want to download Deepsek, even the best VPN services need a little extra help -as they do not false your App Store location so you will have to download it from elsewhere. This is something we usually discourage as it can be a really easy way to be tricked into downloading malware – so do it with caution.
With regard to cybersecurity -risks, it has been reported that dementiak is ‘incredibly vulnerable’ to attacks, and failed to block any harmful requests when tested, severely underpinned against its rivals.
You need to be careful when using these chatbots – especially on a business unit, or if you work in an industry that has national security relations – there is a reason why both Australian and Indian government departments have blocked the use of Deepseek from work units .
A general rule is that users must be particularly careful with the information you provide for a chatbot. Do not enter your health information, financial data or something that you do not want a third party to know. Monitor your accounts for any suspicious activity regularly, and mark everything you see as soon as you see it.
