Taipei, Taiwan – Chinese II Generation Service Deepseek transferred personal information from Korean users to companies in China and the United States without appropriate consent during its brief operation in the country, the Data Protection of South Korea said on Thursday.
Deepseek’s Chatbot application has become the most downloaded from Apple’s iPhone, exceeding the Chatppt of the American company Openai. Although rented for efficiency, it has raised concerns concerning the censorship of sensitive subjects, data confidentiality and links with the Chinese government, with certain governments, including South Korea, prohibiting application.
Deepseek transferred user data to three companies in China and one in the United States between January 15 and February 15, 2025, when the service was temporarily suspended as a result of confidentiality controversies, the Personal Information Protection Commission, or PIPC, announced.
The Chinese service has not obtained user consent for these international transfers or revealed this practice in its privacy policy. With around 50,000 daily users during its one -month service period, the PIPC estimated that information of around 1.5 million users may have been poorly transferred abroad.
The Commission also noted that Deepseek not only sent information on the device, the network and the applications, but also the content that users have entered the AI invited to Volcano, one of the three Chinese companies and a affiliate of Bytedance, the mother company of Tiktok.
Deepseek recognized volcano transfers, but said that it had used business cloud services to improve safety vulnerabilities and user experience. The PIPC told Deepseek that the transfer of rapid entries was not necessary and confirmed that the company had blocked transfers since April 10.
“Deepseek explained that although Volcano is affiliated with Bytedance, it operates as a separate legal entity unrelated to Bydance operations,” the PIPC said in a press release.
“They assured that the information processed would only be used for the operation and improvement of the service, not for marketing purposes, and have promised to strictly protect personal information in accordance with legal requirements.”
The survey also revealed that Deepseek had no “opt-out” function that would allow users to prevent their quick entries from being used for AI training and development. This feature was only implemented after the PIPC underlined the deficiency.
Although Deepseek claimed not to collect personal information from children under the age of 14, he had no age verification process during registration.
The company has since established age verification procedures during the inspection process.
Privacy policy, available only in Chinese and English, has also omitted the demanding information on data deletion procedures, methods and security measures mandated by South Korean privacy law.
The PIPC has recommended that Deepseek immediately remove the content of the user prompt transferred to the volcano and implements several improvements, including the appointment of a national representative in South Korea and improves global security measures for its personal information processing systems.
If Deepseek accepts these recommendations within 10 days, it will be considered equivalent to the reception of an official correction order under relevant laws, obliging the company to report the results of the implementation to the PIPC within 60 days.
Deepseek had previously recognized its insufficient consideration of South Korean laws in terms of confidentiality when it temporarily suspended new downloads on the national application markets after the start of the PIPC survey.
Although the Commission did not specify when Deepseek could resume the services in South Korea, the company should restart operations soon, because it claims to have tackled most of the problems identified.
Deepseek did not comment on the conclusions of South Korea.
Communist party “Enforcer”
The South Korean survey intervened a week after the American selective committee of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, said that up to 85% of the responses on Deepseek had been modified or deleted to respond to the PCC’s account.
The Chatbot uses the automated filtering of integrated responses and prejudices to serve as a “digital manager of the CCP”, manipulating information relevant to democracy, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Chinese human rights violations, said the committee in a report published on April 16.
The survey revealed that Deepseek channels information from American users directly to the CPC via a backend infrastructure connected to China Mobile, listed as a Chinese military company by the United States government.
Millions of American user data therefore serve as “Open Source of Great Values for the PCC intelligence,” he said.
Edited by Mike Firn and Stephen Wright.