Photo Credit: Solen Feyissa
A South Korean data protection regulator says that China’s DeepSeek genAI chatbot is sending data to TikTok owner ByteDance.
The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) announced it would temporarily suspend new downloads of the DeepSeek model in South Korea after the discovery. “We confirmed DeepSeek is communicating with ByteDance,” a PIPC official told the media. Despite confirming data was being sent to ByteDance, PIPC did not share what type of data was transferred and to what extent it is being used.
Under South Korean law, explicit consent from the user is needed to share their personal information with a third party. The PIPC has sent a formal inquiry to DeepSeek seeking clarification on the data being transferred and how it collects data and manages collected data. DeepSeek has acknowledged there are shortcomings in its data collection policies compared to South Korean law. The company has assigned a representative in South Korea and says it will actively cooperate with the commission.
DeepSeek has caused shockwaves in the artificial intelligence community as it claims its new model was trained at a lower cost than US models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Multiple countries have investigated DeepSeek’s data harvesting practices and have found those policies lacking. A U.S. cybersecurity firm alleged DeepSeek was sharing data with ByteDance earlier this month.
Security Scorecard published a blog on DeepSeek and its data sharing practices last week, saying there are “multiple direct references to ByteDance-owned” services in the model. “These references suggest deep integration with ByteDance’s analytics and performance monitoring infrastructure,” the firm said after analyzing the DeepSeek Android app.
South Korea has already followed Australia and Taiwan in banning DeepSeek from government devices. While the app is not banned in those countries for users, the regulators in South Korea have advised users to “exercise caution and avoid entering personal information into the chatbot.”