cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/1834950
Privacy activists are warning about the invasive nature of DeepSeek, which collects a trove of personal user information that could be handed over to the Chinese government
People, however, just don’t care.
Luke de Pulford, co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), shared screenshots from the Chinese AI chatbot’s privacy policy, which stated data it collects is stored in “secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”
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“Just fyi, @deepseek_ai collects your IP, keystroke patterns, device info, etc etc, and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the [Chinese] State,” said de Pulford, leader of IPAC, a global group of lawmakers who seek to hold China accountable for democratic abuses.
“Anticipating tedious whataboutery: the difference between this and free-world social media apps is that you can enforce your data rights in rule of law countries. This is not the case in China,” said de Pulford.
It’s only Chinese surveillance and censorship when you don’t use an open source fork of DeepSeek, which is not possible with OpenAI or any of the other US-based big names. There’s already versions of DS that remove the telemetry and censorship. So it becomes a moot point for one and an unsolvable problem for the others.
Edit: I can’t find one that mentions removal or blocking of telemetry, but this one removes the censorship mechanism. Point still stands. Your data is out there with whoever your AI provider is. It’s part of why I don’t use AI for anything sensitive or important.