this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Privacy

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Is anyone actually surprised by this?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 hour ago

This article is what US propaganda looks like folks. Mashable should be ashamed.

Literally all AI companies do this to run their services. Except you can actually download Deepseek and run it completely securely on your own devices. You know who doesn't allow that security? OpenAI and the other US companies currently being screwed.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 hour ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 hours ago

Oh my, just wait until you learn what Facebook and Google do...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 hours ago

Yes, I’m going to be lectured on privacy by people who are still on twitter.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 hours ago

By extension, anything that's not self hosted means 3rd party actors snooping. American, Chinese, whoever happens to operate that machine.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

the company states that it may share user information to "comply with applicable law, legal process, or government requests.

Literally every company's privacy policy here in the US basically just says that too.

Not only does DeepSeek collect "text or audio input, prompt, uploaded files, feedback, chat history, or other content that [the user] provide[s] to our model and Services," but it also collects information from your device, including "device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language."

Breaking news, company with chatbot you send messages to uses and stores the messages you send, and also does what practically every other app does for demographic statistics gathering and optimizations.

Companies with AI models like Google, Meta, and OpenAI collect similar troves of information, but their privacy policies do not mention collecting keystrokes. There's also the added issue that DeepSeek sends your user data straight to Chinese servers.

They didn't use the word keystrokes, therefore they don't collect them? Of course they collect keystrokes, how else would you type anything into these apps?

In DeepSeek's privacy policy, there's no mention of the security of its servers. There's nothing about whether data is encrypted, either stored or in transmission, and zero information about safeguards to prevent unauthorized access.

This is the only thing that seems disturbing to me, compared to what we'd like to expect based on the context of what DeepSeek is. Of course, this was proven recently in practice to be terrible policy, so I assume they might shore up their defenses a bit.

All the articles that talk about this as if it's some big revelation just boil down to "company does exactly what every other big tech company does in America, except in China"

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 hours ago

Collecting keystrokes is very different from collecting text inputted into fields. Keystroke rhythms is even more alarming as that is often used to identify users despite them using privacy settings, or used to collect what’s typed via audio collection.

Your argument that this is no different than other apps is complete crap. Don’t trust any app that collects that information

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

The Chinese now have data on my Linux vm and my curiosity about sweet potato and sweet potato recipe. They’re coming for me now!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

So I won't use this for the same reason I don't use any AI? Cool

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Did they become american company?

Well, at least models are downloadable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Get it all you can, nvidia's already lobbying to make them a security risk, competition is bad for business.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago

Idk DeepSeek probably just stores things in the history of my Terminal window.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Did the American technology giants think they had the monopoly on capturing human input too?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

My gym sock captures human input too.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

That’s human output surely?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 12 hours ago

I input it into the sock.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, uh... If you think that American companies aren't doing this same thing and handing your data over to the government without a warrant among other bad uses, I have some bad news for you. This is pretty much par for the course, and I'm pretty sure that we're witnessing a well financed negative media blitz happening to try and keep OpenAI from getting all of its spaghetti spilled. Watch for the government to try and ban deepseek for "national security" reasons soon.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 17 hours ago (9 children)

I'm confused. Isn't "collecting keystroke data" just an alarmist way to describe text entry?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Not usually. Keystroke info is different than text input, like if you didn’t click onto any field and typed it would only be captured if keystroke are all being grabbed. It’s especially scary if you keep the app running in the bg and then type something and it still captures it. Not saying they’re doing that, but the privacy policy says they might.

The rhythm part is annoying, it’s commonly used to ID people even through things like ad blocks and dns blocks. Could also (in theory) be used to capture what people are typing just by hearing how they type.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago

Not exactly. Timing between key presses can be used to identify people.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 18 hours ago

"We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China"

Now you Americans know how we Europeans feel when Google, Amazon and Facebook store our information on American servers. Hint: The protective wall between Chinese servers and their government are about as good as the one between American servers and their government - at least for non-US citizens. The last thin veil of privacy for Eurpeans has been ripped to shreds by Trump last week.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

It's a chinese company, where else would they store the data?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I think its called a data lake, so they don't "store" it, its rather floating around there 🤪

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

These lakes are formed when the cloud is saturated and gives us data precipitation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 minutes ago* (last edited 6 minutes ago)

thanks for the great picture 👍

so here is the current cloud clima forecast:

The saturated clouds will rain into the data lakes that are already overspilling here and there into the ransomstreams already taking all soil in their way with them. During the day there will be security clouds preventing from visible rain only while during the night those same security clouds rain themselves all collected data to their homelake while their homelake security already is corrupted and spills over regulary.

As soon as the fort-cisc-pal-ocstricken-redm-ondams breach it'll gonna have floods with multi-exabyte waveheights and the ripples of the release will be felt over to far east china and the currents will circulate around the world multiple times causing damage and devastation in their wake around the world and eventually even reach connected orbit.

The floods will have the potential to also wash away and /or drown or choke all the big tech dinosaurs. Only small foss mammals and deep sea amphibics will survive this historic event.

... you kinda asked for it 😉 same as "they" kinda asked for it too. 🤔

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 16 hours ago

Chinese company uses servers located in China. More news at 11.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I swear people do not understand how the internet works.

Anything you use on a remote server is going to be seen to some degree. They may or may not keep track of you, but you can't be surprised if they are. If you run the model locally, there is no indication it is sending anything anywhere. It runs using the same open source LLM tools that run all the other models you can run locally.

This is very much like someone doing surprised pikachu when they find out that facebook saves all the photos they upload to facebook or that gmail can read your email.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

The telephone company knows your phone number!

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