Worried about DeepSeek and your Privacy?

Yesterday, DeepSeek’s opensource R1 overtook ChatGPT in downloads in the Apple App Store. As R1 became the top rated free application, DeepSeek had to limit registrations, due to numerous large-scale cyberattacks.

Many people have indicated concerns about DeepSeek’s privacy practices.

In its Privacy Policy, DeepSeek states:

"We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China.”

DeepSeek’s Privacy Policy also makes clear that when you use R1, “we may collect your text or audio input, prompt, uploaded files, feedback, chat history, or other content that you provide to our model and Services.” DeepSeek states it will use your personal information and user inputs in a variety of ways, including to “[r]eview, improve, and develop the Service.”

Apart from China-based servers, many United States-based providers of generative AI tools have similar privacy practices, particularly on the free or non-enterprise license of their software. Users commonly give a license to their user inputs, and we’ve seen everything from text to video recordings being licensed (and shared with third parties), including for training purposes of the generative AI tool’s model.

If you are concerned about sharing your information with DeepSeek, you should consider running a local version (there are many resources online explaining how to do this). Perplexity, which is hosted in the United States, announced yesterday that it had integrated DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model, which is now available on Perplexity’s free and paid versions.