DeepSeek faces yet another country-wide ban — here's what that means for you
Kamp, the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, has accused the app of sending personal data to China, a violation of European Union law.
In May, the official requested that DeepSeek comply with legal requirements for data transfer, remove the app themselves, or stop the data transfer.
Kamp's requests were not responded to, leading to the report being filed to both Apple and Google.
Here's what Kamp had to say (machine translated):
'The transfer of user data by DeepSeek to China is unlawful. DeepSeek has not been able to convincingly prove to my authority that data from German users:
Inside China is protected at a level equivalent to that of the European Union.
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Chinese authorities have extensive access rights to personal data within the sphere of influence of Chinese companies.
In addition, DeepSeek users in China do not have enforceable rights and effective remedies guaranteed in the European Union.
I have therefore informed Google and Apple, as operators of the largest app platforms, about the violations and expect a blocking to be checked as soon as possible.'
It remains to be seen what steps Apple or Google will take (if any), but it's clear that each isn't afraid to respond.
DeepSeek drew similar concerns from Italian and Irish watchdogs earlier this year, and was pulled from Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store in Italy, with customers being advised that the app was 'currently not available in the country or area you are in'.
Other countries, while not immediately banning the use of Deepseek are wary of it. The British governemnt has said the use of Deepseek remains a personal choice for the public, but they do monitor all national security threats from any source.
In recent days, Chinese search engine Baidu has announced its Ernie LLM will go open source, suggesting there are more models to come from the country yet.
The Chinese AI model, which launched in late 2024, had huge ramifications for stock prices of US-based tech firms thanks to its rapid adoption and meteoric rise to prominence as a competitor to the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
'Our office will launch an in-depth investigation to see if GDPR rules [European Union data protection regulations] are being respected,' said the head of the Italian data regulator, Pasquale Stanzione, back in January.
According to Deepseek's own privacy policy, it stores numerous bits of personal data, such as requests to its AI system or uploaded files. All of this information is stored on computers in China. In our guide on how to opt out of data training, Deepseek stood out as the hardest AI model to get out of data usage.
In recent days, Chinese search engine Baidu has announced its Ernie LLM will go open source, suggesting there are more models to come from the country yet.
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French intelligence: China used embassies to undermine sales of France's flagship Rafale fighter jet
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Business Insider
an hour ago
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Be careful with this feature in iMessage. It almost ruined my life.
My iPhone threatens to ruin my reputation, career, marriage, friendships, or entire life. Several times a week. Sometimes, I look down to discover it's been — unbeknownst to me — recording an audio message. With one wrong move, I could accidentally send that accidental audio message to, well, anyone. What might have been in those few minutes of surreptitiously recorded audio? Most likely, just ambient white noise coming from inside my purse or pocket. But it could be terrible! Maybe I was singing along (badly) to the radio. Maybe I was loudly discussing some scandalous social gossip or confidential work information. Maybe I was complaining about my editor. (Brad, I know you're reading this — I would never.) Maybe I was having a particularly cacophonic bathroom experience. Accidental iMessage recordings happen on other people's iPhones, too I'm not alone — this is happening to lots of people. When I grumbled about this on Threads, I got dozens of replies from people who were also constantly accidentally recording. There are several Reddit posts about the problem, too. One of those posts contains a pure nightmare: "My phone sent a recording of me peeing to my boss." They said they quickly sent a follow-up text telling their boss the recording was accidental and not to listen. "I have no idea if he heard it. I can only assume he did and, out of respect, never brought it up," the redditor told me over direct message. Another person said they accidentally sent a recording of sexy talk with their spouse to their sister. Yikes! Of course, sending voice memos and audio recordings can be great! Sometimes, they come in handy when you want to tell a longer story — and especially in group chats. The other day, I sent a four-minute audio recording to my friend detailing some gossip about our social circle. But I want to use audio recordings to gossip — not accidentally be the cause of it. ("Did you hear Katie sent a recording of herself in the bathroom to the group?!") What was driving me nuts was that I couldn't really seem to understand why this kept happening. In fact, when I actually want to send an audio recording, I fumble around with actually knowing how to do it. Hint: It's not the microphone in the text box — that's for speech-to-text. The audio message is buried in the list of options when you hit the "+" sign, sandwiched between Stickers, Apple Cash, Send Later, and Memoji. (Tim Cook, I am looking you dead in the eyes and telling you I will never use Memojis. Stop trying to make Memojis happen.) I love my iPhone because it usually just works. I understand it, it's intuitive, and after years of using one, I understand how the features work. But here I was, unable to figure out why this kept happening. Was it a bug or user error? If this is happening on your iPhone, there's a fix It turns out, the "Raise to Listen" feature is ON by default in iMessage. This feature is for you to be able to listen to audio recordings when you put the phone up to your ear, but it also works the other way. When you have iMessage open and put the phone up to your ear (or close to it — the phone gets confused sometimes!), it can trigger the audio recording. Here's how you find it: Go to Settings > Apps > Messages. Scroll all the way down until you see the "Raise to Listen" feature. Toggle this OFF if you don't want to use it. It might make it slightly more difficult to listen to audio messages, but it will stop the accidental ones. (When I reached out to Apple for comment on my potential life-ruining, they suggested turning off Raise to Listen if it was an issue for me.) The Raise to Listen feature has been causing weird accidental audio messages since at least 2015, but it seems (in my experience) that it's happened much more often in the last year or so. Now that I've turned the feature off, I can breathe (and poop) easily, knowing I wont accidentally send someone a recording. You should do it, too.
