On January 28, Garante - Italy's data protection agency said it had asked startup DeepSeek to provide information about its use of users' personal data.

Authorities want to know what data DeepSeek collects, from what sources, for what purposes, on what legal basis and where it is stored.

DeepSeek and its affiliates have 20 days to respond.

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DeepSeek's AI app is no longer accessible on Apple and Google marketplaces in Italy. Photo: Shutterstock

In the US, the White House press secretary said authorities were looking into the national security implications of DeepSeek. The Irish Data Protection Commission has also sent a request to DeepSeek to learn how it handles data related to Irish users.

On January 29, DeepSeek’s app was no longer accessible on Apple and Google stores in Italy. When searching, users saw a message that the app was not available in the region or not supported.

People who have already downloaded the app will still be able to use it. Other countries in the European Union and the UK are not affected.

Last week, DeepSeek released a free AI assistant app that the company claims it developed at a much lower cost than its competitors.

Over the weekend, the app surpassed ChatGPT in downloads on the US App Store, causing panic among the tech stock investing community. A few days later, the Android version also topped the Google Play charts in the US.

According to app analytics firm AppFigures, since its launch in mid-January, DeepSeek's app has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times on Google Play and more than 1.9 million times on the App Store globally.

DeepSeek's strong rise on the charts shows its formidable competitiveness compared to Western services from Meta, OpenAI, Google.

Basically, the application is quite similar to ChatGPT, developed based on the open source model DeepSeek V3. It is used to analyze files, answer questions, and get information from the web.

However, its security capabilities remain a question mark. Cloud security firm Wiz has just released a report showing that DeepSeek exposed one of the most important databases on the Internet.

Anyone can view a total of over 1 million records, including system login history, user prompts, and even API authentication tokens.

About half an hour after Wiz sent the information to people who might be involved with DeepSeek, despite no response, the database was locked and inaccessible.

Wiz CTO Ami Luttwak advised that “the service is not mature enough to be used with sensitive data.”

According to CNBC , the US Navy has warned all personnel not to download, install and use DeepSeek's model due to potential ethical and security concerns.

(According to Wired, TechCrunch)