In addition to questioning the Chinese AI app DeepSeek’s answers to questions about matters of national pride, South Korea’s spy service has accused the app of “excessively” gathering personal data and using all input data to train itself.
According to the National Intelligence Service (NIS), last week it formally advised government agencies to implement security measures regarding the Artificial Intelligence app.
“Unlike other generative AI services, it has been confirmed that chat records are transferable as it includes a function to collect keyboard input patterns that can identify individuals and communicate with Chinese companies’ servers such as volceapplog.com,” the NIS said in a statement released on Sunday.
South Korea has joined Taiwan and Australia in warning against or restricting access to DeepSeek, with some government ministries blocking the program due to security concerns.
According to the NIS, DeepSeek keeps South Korean users’ data on Chinese servers and grants advertisers unrestricted access to user data. The agency further stated that such information would be accessible to the Chinese government upon request under Chinese law.
The NIS also pointed out that DeepSeek gave varying responses in various languages to inquiries that would be considered sensitive.
The origin of kimchi, a hot, fermented meal that is a mainstay in South Korea, was one of the questions it mentioned.
The NIS stated that kimchi is a Korean cuisine when the app was questioned about it in Korean.
When asked the same question in Chinese, it stated that the food came from China. Reuters confirmed the answers provided by DeepSeek.
In recent years, the provenance of kimchi has occasionally become a point of disagreement between Chinese and South Korean social media users.
Additionally, DeepSeek has been charged with filtering answers to political queries, including those about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, which causes the app to recommend a different topic: “Let’s talk about something else.”
A request for comment via email was not immediately answered by DeepSeek. A Chinese foreign ministry official told a briefing on February 6 that the Chinese government placed a high value on data privacy and security and protected it in compliance with the law when questioned about actions taken by South Korean government departments to ban DeepSeek.
The official added that Beijing would never request that any business or person gather or keep data in violation of the law.
