South Korea has accused the startup of Chinese AI in depth to share user data with the owner of Tiktok in China.
“We have confirmed that Deepseek communicated with Bytedance,” said the South Korean data protection regulator in Yonhap.
The country had already deleted Deepseek from application stores over the weekend compared to data protection problems.
The Chinese application caused shock waves worldwide in January, wiping billions of world stock markets on affirmations that its new model has been formed at a much lower cost than American competitors such as Chatgpt .
Since then, several countries have warned that user data may not be properly protected and, in February, an American cybersecurity company allegedly alleged the potential sharing of data between Deepseek and Bytedance.
The apparent impact of Deepseek during the night saw him shoot at the top of the prize list of apps in the United Kingdom, the United States and many other countries of the world-although it is now good Below chatgpt in British rankings.
In South Korea, it had been downloaded more than a million times before being taken from Apple and Google stores on Saturday evening.
Existing users can always access the application and use it on a web browser.
The data regulator, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), told the news agency Yonhap in South Korea that despite finding a link between Deepseek and Bytedance, it was ” to confirm the data transferred and to what extent “.
Critics of the Chinese state have long argued that its national intelligence law allows the government to access all the data it wishes from Chinese companies.
However, Bytedance, whose headquarters are in Beijing, belongs to a certain number of global investors – and others say that the same law allows the protection of private companies and personal data.
The fears concerning the data of users sent to China were one of the reasons why the United States Supreme Court has confirmed a ban by Tiktok, which belongs to Bytedance.
The American ban is pending until April 5 while President Donald Trump is trying to negotiate a resolution.
Cybersecurity Company Security Scorecard published a blog on Deepseek on February 10 which suggested direct references to services belonging to Bytedance.
“These references suggest in-depth integration of the Bytedance analysis and monitoring infrastructure,” he said in his examination of the Android application of Deepseek.
The security dashboard has expressed concern, with the risk of confidentiality, the “Deepseek user behavior and the apparatus metadata (are probably sent to the Bytedance servers”.
He also found that data “is transmitted to the areas linked to Chinese state entities”.
On Monday, the South Korea’s PIPC said that it “discovered the traffic generated by third -party data transfers and insufficient transparency in Deepsek’s privacy policy”.
He said Deepseek co-opted with the regulator and recognized that he had not taken into account the South Korean laws in matters of confidentiality.
But the regulator advised users to be cautious and avoid entering personal information in the chatbot “.
South Korea has already followed a number of countries like Australia and Taiwan to ban Deepseek from government apparatus.
The BBC contacted the PIPC, Bytedance and the mother company of Deepseek, High Flyer, for a response.
