Australia has banned DeepSeek from all government devices and systems over what it says is the security risk the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup poses.
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Growing - and familiar - concerns
Western countries have a track record of being suspicious of Chinese tech - notably telecoms firm Huawei and the social media platform, TikTok - both of which have been restricted on national security grounds.
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An Australian science minister previously said in January that countries needed to be “very careful” about DeepSeek, citing “data and privacy” concerns.
The chatbot was removed from app stores after its privacy policy was questioned in Italy. The Italian goverment previously temporarily blocked ChatGPT over privacy concerns in March 2023.
Regulators in South Korea, Ireland and France have all begun investigations into how DeepSeek handles user data, which it stores in servers in China.
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Generally, AI tools will analyse the prompts sent to them to improve their product.
This is true of apps such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini as much as it is DeepSeek.
All of them gather and keep information, including email addresses and dates of birth.
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good luck getting a Chinese government supported company to pay a fine
How many of these Chinese government supported companies are being provided a veneer of legitimacy by being officially sanctioned to use on state and federal supplied and supported IT resources? Because Microsoft 100% is. Hell they are even getting to supply training materials to government workers on how best to integrate Copilot into their day to day workflows. I am no fan of the Chinese government but I don’t reserve a greater store of trust for US backed Ad-tech companies either and thanks to Five Eyes once one of the aligned governments has your info it’s the same as all of them having it. I have only once interacted with an online LLM, run a few self hosted on my own hardware for probably 3-4 hours and realised that they aren’t worth the power consumption, and really aren’t worth opening a gaping hole into my own privacy. The fact that there are government workers and government organisations who are happily surrendering our data to these companies with no explicit consent sets off more alarm bells than I can express, regardless of the country of origin. And yes I declined the eHealth record and will be doing everything I can to resist digital drivers license because our government is fundamentally untrustworthy and borderline tech illiterate and the IT consultancies they deal with for any IT related infrastructure or services make them look like paragons of virtue and competency.
But that’s just my opinion.
Edit: fixed my spelling, sorry to anyone who gets as annoyed by that as I do 😃