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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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.
They need to ban CoPilot, OpenAI, Apple Intelligence and all the other remora swimming around trying to get some tidbits of data.
Our government banning wealthy off-shore interests just because they happen to be highly toxic and detrimental with negligible benefits to the citizens they are exploiting…
Sounds like a slippery slope there.
I imagine there are more than a few companies/industries that would see that as a dangerous precedent.
Apple Intelligence isn’t in the same league. It’s entirely local-only, except for when it specifically asks/offers to use ChatGPT for certain things. Even Siri has been local-only for some time on most devices (notably not homepods).