The Berlin Commissioner for Knowledge Safety has formally requested Google and Apple to take away the DeepSeek AI utility from the appliance shops resulting from GDPR violations.
The commissioner, Meike Kamp, alleges that DeepSeek’s proprietor, Hangzhou DeepSeek Synthetic Intelligence, primarily based in Beijing, unlawfully collects knowledge from German customers and transfers them for processing in servers in China.
As per the GDPR and Article 46 (1) particularly, any private knowledge collected from people within the European Union should be protected in response to the requirements upheld by the regulatory act.
Nonetheless, China has very lax knowledge safety laws and a historical past of extreme knowledge entry requests to personal entities. Due to this, it’s unlikely that DeepSeek has applied ample authorized safeguards to ensure its safety to EU requirements.
“The corporate has no department throughout the European Union (EU),” explains the commissioner.
“The service is made obtainable to customers in Germany, amongst different locations, by means of apps within the Google Play Retailer and Apple App Retailer with German-language descriptions and can be utilized within the German language.”
“This makes the service topic to the provisions of the European Common Knowledge Safety Regulation (GDPR).”
DeepSeek is a Chinese language AI platform that rose to prominence in January 2025 after the discharge of the third era of its chatbot, which got here with in depth capabilities.
Though this sudden reputation was rapidly tarnished by critical cybersecurity issues that uncovered insecure practices, the platform continued to get pleasure from reputation within the international AI neighborhood.
The DeepSeek AI app has 50 million downloads on Google PlayAndroid’s official app retailer, and hundreds of scores on Apple’s App Retailer.
Kamp had requested DeepSeek to voluntarily take away its apps from app shops in Germany this 12 months on Could 6 however the firm refused to conform.
Therefore, the Berlin authorities now made use of Article 16 of the Digital Companies Act (DSA), which permits them to report unlawful content material on platforms to the respective operators, on this case, Apple and Google.
The 2 tech giants will now must assessment the commissioner’s report and determine whether or not DeepSeek AI might be faraway from their shops or not.
Though the request was submitted by a state-level regulator and never the German authorities, there’s coordinationwith different regulators from Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Bremen, in addition to the Federal Community Company (Bundesnetzagentur).
BleepingComputer has contacted Google, Apple, and DeepSeek to touch upon the scenario, and we are going to replace this publish once we hear again from them.
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