The Australian government says the Chinese AI app is a threat to it and its assets.

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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  • TaleyaEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    Again i ask the question: why am i left with the perception that end users have the ability to acess or install this in the workplace in the first place.

    Any IT department worth it’s paycheque would already have everything locked down to hell. I work with a lot of local councils and they’ve grasped this concept

  • tauEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    You’d have to be mad to put important information into any AI model unless you’re hosting it locally and know it isn’t sending info anywhere (the latter being the hard part to verify). All of the online AI services really should be blocked if departments/companies are taking security seriously.

  • tombruzzoEnglish
    5·
    3 hours ago

    We got an email at work not to use DeepSeek. And yeah, it’s funny how all the western malware is completely fine

    • Seagoon_English
      1·
      2 hours ago

      western malware isn’t overseen by tyrannical western governments

  • Seagoon_English
    11·
    2 hours ago

    yup, all your personal informal gets sent back to China

  • DavidDoesLemmyEnglish
    1·
    3 hours ago

    This is the service that is banned, not the model itself, right?

  • shads@lemy.lolEnglish
    15·
    7 hours ago

    And yet Copilot is busy burrowing into the flesh of the government like a growing hookworm, a large swathe of big business is simply trusting to Microsoft’s: “Oh no we keep your data entirely seperate and safe. We don’t use it to train the LLM, pinky promise.” Whilst ChatGPT keeps showing up in the hands of the most clueless people, “Oh I gave it all my personal info so it could rewrite my resume. How great is AI!”

    I feel like this could be solved immediately and easily, make every privacy breach by any company subject to a fine totalling a single digit percentage of global turnover of the company. So for each privacy breach where Copilot is involved that will be… say… 3 billion dollars. They would yank their “AI Solution” from the local market so quickly you would hear a cracking sound.

    • Seagoon_English
      2·
      2 hours ago

      good luck getting a Chinese government supported company to pay a fine

      • shads@lemy.lolEnglish
        1·
        8 minutes ago

        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 of 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.