Apple and Google have been asked to consider banning the artificial intelligence chatbot app DeepSeek from their respective app stores in Germany.
Berlin’s data protection commissioner, Meike Kamp, says the app’s user privacy rules violate Germany’s data protection laws. “The transfer of user data by DeepSeek to China is illegal,” she says. Kamp’s department asked DeepSeek to change its rules for non-EU data transfers in May or withdraw from the German market. DeepSeek didn’t respond to the requests.
“Chinese authorities have far-reaching access rights to personal data within the sphere of influence of Chinese companies,” Kamp adds.
Kamp is asking Apple and Google to review a request to remove the app from the App Store and Play Store and act on it in an undefined “timely” manner.
The rule change may have ripple effects across Europe and the UK. Matt Holman, AI and data lawyer at Cripps, suggests to CNBC that the move “could lead to an EU-wide ban because the rules that apply in Germany are the same elsewhere in the EU and also in the UK.”
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Earlier this week, a group of US lawmakers introduced a bill, the “No Adversarial AI Act,” that would ban federal agencies from using tools developed in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea.
PCMag recently reviewed DeepSeek, and we found it lacking some tools many other chatbots offer. “In addition to problematic censorship and data collection policies, DeepSeek falls short on features and performance. There are better AI chatbots out there,” we concluded.
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