The Berlin Commissioner for Information Safety has formally requested Google and Apple to take away the DeepSeek AI utility from the appliance shops because of GDPR violations.
The commissioner, Meike Kamp, alleges that DeepSeek’s proprietor, Hangzhou DeepSeek Synthetic Intelligence, primarily based in Beijing, unlawfully collects information from German customers and transfers them for processing in servers in China.
As per the GDPR and Article 46 (1) particularly, any private information collected from people within the European Union have to be protected in keeping with the requirements upheld by the regulatory act.
Nonetheless, China has very lax information safety laws and a historical past of extreme information entry requests to personal entities. Due to this, it’s unlikely that DeepSeek has carried out adequate 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, via 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 Normal Information Safety Regulation (GDPR).”
DeepSeek is a Chinese language AI platform that rose to prominence in January 2025 after the discharge of the third technology of its chatbot, which got here with intensive capabilities.
Though this sudden reputation was shortly tarnished by critical cybersecurity issues that uncovered insecure practices, the platform continued to get pleasure from reputation within the world AI neighborhood.
The DeepSeek AI app has 50 million downloads on Google Play, Android’s official app retailer, and hundreds of rankings on Apple’s App Retailer.
Kamp had requested DeepSeek to voluntarily take away its apps from app shops in Germany this 12 months on Might 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 need to evaluate the commissioner’s report and determine whether or not DeepSeek AI shall be faraway from their shops or not.
Though the request was submitted by a state-level regulator and never the German authorities, there may be 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 state of affairs, and we are going to replace this publish once we hear again from them.
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