Is anyone actually surprised by this?
This article is what US propaganda looks like folks. Mashable should be ashamed.
Literally all AI companies do this to run their services. Except you can actually download Deepseek and run it completely securely on your own devices. You know who doesn’t allow that security? OpenAI and the other US companies currently being screwed.
Oh my, just wait until you learn what Facebook and Google do…
Yes, I’m going to be lectured on privacy by people who are still on twitter.
Just host it yourself?
By extension, anything that’s not self hosted means 3rd party actors snooping. American, Chinese, whoever happens to operate that machine.
the company states that it may share user information to "comply with applicable law, legal process, or government requests.
Literally every company’s privacy policy here in the US basically just says that too.
Not only does DeepSeek collect “text or audio input, prompt, uploaded files, feedback, chat history, or other content that [the user] provide[s] to our model and Services,” but it also collects information from your device, including “device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language.”
Breaking news, company with chatbot you send messages to uses and stores the messages you send, and also does what practically every other app does for demographic statistics gathering and optimizations.
Companies with AI models like Google, Meta, and OpenAI collect similar troves of information, but their privacy policies do not mention collecting keystrokes. There’s also the added issue that DeepSeek sends your user data straight to Chinese servers.
They didn’t use the word keystrokes, therefore they don’t collect them? Of course they collect keystrokes, how else would you type anything into these apps?
In DeepSeek’s privacy policy, there’s no mention of the security of its servers. There’s nothing about whether data is encrypted, either stored or in transmission, and zero information about safeguards to prevent unauthorized access.
This is the only thing that seems disturbing to me, compared to what we’d like to expect based on the context of what DeepSeek is. Of course, this was proven recently in practice to be terrible policy, so I assume they might shore up their defenses a bit.
All the articles that talk about this as if it’s some big revelation just boil down to “company does exactly what every other big tech company does in America, except in China”
Collecting keystrokes is very different from collecting text inputted into fields. Keystroke rhythms is even more alarming as that is often used to identify users despite them using privacy settings, or used to collect what’s typed via audio collection.
Your argument that this is no different than other apps is complete crap. Don’t trust any app that collects that information
The Chinese now have data on my Linux vm and my curiosity about sweet potato and sweet potato recipe. They’re coming for me now!
So I won’t use this for the same reason I don’t use any AI? Cool
Did they become american company?
Well, at least models are downloadable.
Get it all you can, nvidia’s already lobbying to make them a security risk, competition is bad for business.
Idk DeepSeek probably just stores things in the history of my Terminal window.
Did the American technology giants think they had the monopoly on capturing human input too?
My gym sock captures human input too.
That’s human output surely?
I input it into the sock.
Yeah, uh… If you think that American companies aren’t doing this same thing and handing your data over to the government without a warrant among other bad uses, I have some bad news for you. This is pretty much par for the course, and I’m pretty sure that we’re witnessing a well financed negative media blitz happening to try and keep OpenAI from getting all of its spaghetti spilled. Watch for the government to try and ban deepseek for “national security” reasons soon.
Not gonna happen. Someone in China gave to Trump’s inauguration fund, so nothing’s getting banned.
I’m confused. Isn’t “collecting keystroke data” just an alarmist way to describe text entry?
Not usually. Keystroke info is different than text input, like if you didn’t click onto any field and typed it would only be captured if keystroke are all being grabbed. It’s especially scary if you keep the app running in the bg and then type something and it still captures it. Not saying they’re doing that, but the privacy policy says they might.
The rhythm part is annoying, it’s commonly used to ID people even through things like ad blocks and dns blocks. Could also (in theory) be used to capture what people are typing just by hearing how they type.
Not exactly. Timing between key presses can be used to identify people.
Maybe. They could also be doing things like paying attention to input cadence and typos/pre-send typo corrections to use as part of a fingerprint associated with the identifying information a user gives them when creating an account so that they can then attempt to detect the user elsewhere on the web whether they are using an identifying account or not.
So, basically using Facebook technology in their AI app?
You’ll hear no arguments from me on that point, US tech companies are toxic af.
This argument applies to literally every single web app you use.
How far we’ve come
Yes.
this. i mean, the session logs for the prompt are kept at least for your user, right?
“We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China”
Now you Americans know how we Europeans feel when Google, Amazon and Facebook store our information on American servers. Hint: The protective wall between Chinese servers and their government are about as good as the one between American servers and their government - at least for non-US citizens. The last thin veil of privacy for Eurpeans has been ripped to shreds by Trump last week.
It’s a chinese company, where else would they store the data?
The balls.
I think its called a data lake, so they don’t “store” it, its rather floating around there 🤪
These lakes are formed when the cloud is saturated and gives us data precipitation.
Antarctica, clearly.
