It’s one of those disruptive things: “DeepSeek’s AI assistant became the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple’s iPhone store Monday, propelled by curiosity about the ChatGPT competitor. Part of what’s worrying some U.S. tech industry observers is the idea that the Chinese startup has caught up with the American companies at the forefront of generative AI at a fraction of the cost” (Associated Press, January 27, 2025).
We should also be worried about something else, like whether the Chinese Communist Party has access to our keystrokes.
No, no, I’m being paranoid. Luke de Pulford reports on Twitter-X that “@deepseek_ai collects your IP, keystroke patterns, device info, etc., etc., and stores it in China, where all that data is vulnerable to arbitrary requisition from the [Chinese] State.”
He then displays an image of DeepSeek’s “own privacy policy,” or no-privacy policy, which includes the following advisory about “Automatically Collected Information”:
Technical information. We collect certain device and network connection information when you access the Service. This information includes your device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms [emphasis added], IP address [emphasis added], and system language…. Where you log in from multiple devices, we use information such as your device ID and user ID to identify your activity across devices to give you a seamless log-in experience and for security purposes [emphasis added].
Security from the Chinese Communist Party, the organization that no Chinese company can say no to?
Many sites and software know your IP address. They don’t also all download keyloggers into your system. Should we expect that the keylogging is scrupulously confined to the text of questions the user asks of DeepSeek and would never also capture passwords and the like? I would have trouble trusting even the Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard, with its occasional (we’re told) snippet-capturing, let alone a DeepSeek-style setup.
Who needs cyberhackers when the targets are cyberhacking themselves?
