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South Korea has halted new downloads of China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot due to concerns over personal data.
Seoul’s data protection authority, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), has intimated it intends to lift the suspension once DeepSeek takes action on some of its regulations.
Once the app is compliant with South Korea’s privacy laws, normal business will resume, said the authority in a statement.
The pause took effect on Saturday (Feb. 15), but the Chinese entity had already appointed legal representatives in the country, in acknowledgment of the issue.
While the block on new downloads of the app has been applied, the web version is still available in South Korea.
DeepSeek R1 is the in-demand AI chatbot that has risen in prominence since the turn of the year. The powerful ChatGPT alternative has captured the imagination of users with its impressive efficiency credentials, to the extent that OpenAI, Meta, and Google have been scrambling to respond to the free, open-source offering.
DeepSeek R1 will request your data, which will likely be held on its China-based servers, but this isn’t much different from Google or OpenAI requesting your information to be stored on their respective systems in the United States.
South Korea's data protection authority suspends local service of DeepSeek https://t.co/HYgvpT0YXI pic.twitter.com/kua6TXWnfv
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 17, 2025
Success tempered with caution
There have been reports of DeepSeek generating harmful content, including details on bioweapons.
Testing by experts indicated the app provided instructions for a bioweapon attack, and could also craft a phishing email with a malware code. This has led to calls from developers for guardrails to be introduced on DeepSeek.
DeepSeek has enjoyed a rapid rise to the forefront of the AI chatbot market, but its success has been tempered with caution after several countries introduced controls.
In addition to the pause in South Korea, authorities in Australia and Taiwan have banned the app from all government devices.
In Europe, Italy has confirmed similar privacy concerns as those raised in Seoul, mirroring the action taken against ChatGPT in 2023.
Last month, Italy’s Garante data protection authority ordered DeepSeek to block its app in the country due to the regulator’s concerns over data privacy.
In the United States, lawmakers have proposed an outright ban on the use of DeepSeek on federal devices, with Texas, Virginia, and New York already taking action at state level.
Image credit: Via Midjourney
