South Korea’s intelligence agency has raised alarms over the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek, accusing it of excessively collecting user data and training itself using all input data. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) has urged government agencies to exercise caution while using the app, citing potential security risks.
The NIS revealed that DeepSeek differs from other generative AI platforms as it transfers chat records and collects keyboard input patterns, which could potentially be used to identify individuals, Reuters reports. The collected data is then transmitted to Chinese servers, including those associated with volceapplog.com.
Following the NIS warning, several South Korean government ministries have blocked access to DeepSeek, joining Australia, Taiwan, Italy and India in imposing restrictions or issuing warnings against the app.
Authorities fear that under Chinese law, Beijing could access South Korean users’ data stored on Chinese servers, posing a national security risk.
Another point of contention is DeepSeek’s handling of politically and culturally sensitive topics. The NIS found that the AI app provides differing responses based on language. When asked about the origin of kimchi in Korean, DeepSeek identified it as Korean, and DeepSeek identified it as a Korean dish. However, in Chinese, the app claimed the dish originated in China.
This inconsistency in DeepSeek’s responses has heightened concerns about potential biases in the AI’s training data. Also, Microsoft has opened an investigation against DeepSeek for unauthorised OpenAI data scrapping.
Furthermore, the app has been accused of censoring responses to politically sensitive topics. Questions related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown reportedly prompt DeepSeek to deflect the conversation with phrases like, “Let’s talk about something else.”
Last week, reports showed that DeepSeek’s iOS app sent unencrypted data to ByteDance servers last week. Moreover, cybercriminals have shifted to DeepSeek and Qwen for malicious activities because of these platforms’ lack of strict regulations.
Last month, researchers discovered a misconfigured ClickHouse database of DeepSeek to be publicly accessible and expose sensitive information.
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