Chinese artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek has been accused by South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission, the country's privacy watchdog, of having provided its user data with TikTok parent firm ByteDance just after the AI service was suspended by the country due to data protection law violations, reports BBC.
While a connection between DeepSeek and ByteDance has been established, the extent of transferred data remains uncertain, said the PIPC to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. Such a development comes more than a week after a Security Scorecard report detailing DeepSeek's several direct references to various services owned by ByteDance. "These references suggest deep integration with ByteDance's analytics and performance monitoring infrastructure," said Security Scorecard, which not only noted the potential delivery of user behavior and device metadata to ByteDance servers but also data transmission to Chinese state-owned organizations' domains. Mounting data privacy concerns surrounding DeepSeek have already prompted Australia and Taiwan to prohibit its usage in government-issued devices.
