Data protection commissioner wants to ban Deepseek from app stores

According to Federal Data Protection Commissioner Louisa Specht-Riemenschneider, the Chinese AI application Deepseek is to be removed from German app stores due to violations of European law. "China does not have a level of data protection that corresponds to our General Data Protection Regulation," she told the Funke Media Group newspapers. Therefore, data leaks to China are "extremely critical."

Specht-Riemenschneider rejected criticism that data protection was becoming a barrier to innovation. "Data protection guarantees trust. This can even be a locational advantage," said the Federal Data Protection Commissioner. "What inhibits innovation is legal uncertainty in the market. And this also stems from the proliferation of digital legislation." What is needed in Europe is better coordinated digital legislation with clear rules, including for data protection, said Specht-Riemenschneider.

Authorities in South Korea, Italy, Taiwan, and Australia have already taken action against Deepseek. The Italian data protection authority launched an investigation to determine whether the app violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There is no nationwide ban in the United States, but several federal agencies, such as NASA and the Department of Defense, have banned their employees from using the app.

The Chinese chatbot, based on open-source language models, has shaken up the AI industry, as the app achieves comparable or even better results than established providers such as OpenAI, Google, or Meta. At the same time, according to Deepseek, the program's development cost only a fraction of what OpenAI invested in ChatGPT.