Deepseek’s story is very short, but it already has more script turns than the best Hollywood movies. The new artificial intelligence from China became the most used overnight, caught by surprise giants like OpenAi; But it can also disappear just as fast.
Suddenly, lA Depseek app has been eliminated from Google and Apple stores; However, for the moment the measure only affects users who connect from Italy, and at the time of writing these words, the app is still available for download from Spain, both in the Play Store and the App Store.
When they look for the name of the Depseek app in apps stores, Italian users see a message indicating that the app “is not currently available in the country or area in which you are”, and Google indicates that The download of the app “is not supported” in Italy. At the moment, the rest of the EU countries are not affected.
Although Depseek has not made public statements in this regard, the disappearance of its app comes less than 24 hours after the Italian data protection agency has declared its intention to “seek answers” of the Chinese company about the way you get and use user data. Therefore, everything indicates that the withdrawal of the app has been carried out anticipating a possible penalty or fine, which can be calculated based on the number of users that have been downloaded and used the app.
The collection of user data is one of the great criticisms that Deepseek has received in its short time of life. The app is characterized by offering access to artificial intelligence at the same level of the best chatgpt modelsbut unlike the OpenAI app, it offers that performance completely free and without the need for subscription. The key is in the greatest efficiency of its model, which does not require so many processing units and therefore, it is cheaper to train and offer the general public.
However, Deepseek’s ‘trap’ is in the terms of use that the user has to accept the app or the website, and in which he gives permission to the company to obtain and manage the data that he enters into the service. Not only Depseek reserves the right to use that data, but they can also be offered to “commercial partners”; in other words, You can sell them to third parties.
The doubts of the Italian regulator were in If these mechanisms comply with the data protection regulations That it is mandatory in the European Union, and for this, he indicated that he wanted to know exactly what personal data were being stored, where they came from, with what purposes they were being stored, what legal basis the company had to store them, and if they were stored outside The EU, as in China.
Depseek had 20 days to resolve those issues before facing possible sanctions; However, the withdrawal of the country’s company can ‘save him’, although only momentarily. The GDPR is applied throughout the European Union, and that means that data protection agencies in Spain and other member countries can also ask the same questions and apply the same sanctions.
This is not the first artificial intelligence app that ends up being expelled from Italy. In 2023, Chatgpt was temporarily prohibited in the country for the same reasons, due to doubts about the way in which it managed user data. A year later, the Italian agency determined that, in effect, Chatgpt violated users’ privacy, although currently the service is again available in the country.
