January 30, 2025 - Late last week, an announcement came out of China about a company named DeepSeek. It's an AI company that's developed an application very similar to ChatGPT. The company is claiming that it can provide Superior results to ChatGPT at 1/30th of the cost. That claim sent other AI Company stock prices into a tailspin this week. At the same time, millions of Americans rushed to both the Apple and Google app stores to download DeepSeek to their phones. Those downloads could be extremely dangerous.

News coverage of DeepSeek’s claims has been extensive for the past several days. It's no wonder that people want to try their app out. But one reading of their privacy policy should give anyone pause.

DeepSeek’s privacy policy is Orwellian. It gives the company the right to log your keystrokes, search through your documents, and capture login information both through your browser and through other apps. It also gives them a permission to log the sites that you visit. And the information that they collect is then stored on servers in China which are not subject to American privacy laws.

All of this is highly unusual and very risky. We’ve looked at the privacy policies of ChatGPT, Co-Pilot and Claude. None of those applications require the user to give up all of their privacy the way that DeepSeek does.

Anyone who downloads the DeepSeek app to their phone or tablet appears to be inviting an invasion of privacy and opening themselves up to financial victimization. If you access your bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, etc. from the same device that you load DeepSeek on, you appear to be giving whoever runs that company the ability to break into those accounts. And because Chinese companies are required to work with the Chinese government, you may very well be handing over all of your information to the Chinese Communist Party.

If you use biometric information, such as your fingerprint or facial recognition, to open up your phone or log into applications, we believe that their privacy policy also allows them to capture that information. And there is no telling how that information will be used in the future.

 In addition to these issues, DeepSeek is also censoring information. If you ask it questions about Tiananmen Square, or XI Jinping, it will tell you that it can't provide you any answers. Pretty much any information that China considers sensitive is censored. Because of this alone, results provided by DeepSeek should raise serious questions about whether or not they are accurate or simply propaganda.

To be clear, we have no information to indicate that DeepSeek is misusing the information that it is collecting from users. But neither do we have information to indicate that they aren’t. It is ACCESS opinion that the risks of using DeepSeek far outweigh any potential benefits and that anyone who has downloaded the program would be wise to immediately uninstall it. There are plenty of alternatives available that don’t require you to completely sign over the keys to your personal kingdom.

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