Germany's data protection commissioner, Luisa Scheibecht-Riemenschneider, has called for the removal of the Chinese artificial intelligence app DeepSeek from the country's app stores due to its "violations of European law."
In statements to the Funke Media Group newspapers, the government commissioner said, "China does not have a level of data protection that meets our General Data Protection Regulation," noting that for this reason, data leaks to China are "a very sensitive issue."
Berlin's Data Protection Commissioner, Maike Kamp, had previously filed a complaint against the app with Google and Apple, citing "illegal content." The two American companies must examine the complaint and decide whether to ban it. Kamp is entitled to take this step in this case because DeepSeek does not have a branch in Europe. If it did, only the local data protection authority in the branch's country would be competent. For her part, Spesch-Riemenschneider announced her support for the Berlin Commissioner's move.
Spekt-Riemenschneider rejected criticism that data protection is a barrier to innovation, saying, "Data protection ensures trust, and this can even be a competitive advantage for a particular site." She added, "What hinders innovation is the lack of legal certainty in the market, which also arises from the chaos in digital legislation." She emphasized the need for coordinated digital legislation at the European level, including clear rules for data protection.
It's worth noting that authorities in South Korea, Italy, Taiwan, and Australia have already taken action against DeepSeek, with the Italian Data Protection Authority launching an investigation to determine whether the app violates the European General Data Protection Regulation. In the United States, there is no nationwide ban on the app, but some federal agencies, such as NASA and the Department of Defense, have banned their employees from using it.
The Chinese chat app, based on open-source language models, has attracted widespread interest in the AI sector, delivering results that rival or outperform established providers such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta. According to DeepSec, developing this program cost only a fraction of what OpenAI invested in developing ChatGPT, for example.
