Service Resumes Five Days After Personal Information Commission's Inspection
DeepSeek Specifies "Personal Information Processed in Compliance with Korean Personal Information Protection Act"
China's generative artificial intelligence (AI) service "DeepSeek" has partially accepted the South Korean government's corrective recommendations and resumed its application download service after two months. DeepSeek had previously been at the center of controversy due to excessive personal information collection and was recently subject to an inspection by the South Korean government.
On April 28 (local time), DeepSeek revised its privacy policy, released a Korean-language version, and made partial amendments to its personal information policy. This comes just five days after the Personal Information Protection Commission reviewed and approved the "DeepSeek Preliminary Inspection Results" on April 23.
According to the commission's inspection, DeepSeek did not obtain user consent or disclose its privacy policy regarding overseas data transfers. During this period, it was revealed that prompt information entered by domestic users into DeepSeek's chat window was transferred to "Volcano," a subsidiary of ByteDance?the parent company of TikTok based in China.
The commission recommended that DeepSeek establish a solid legal basis for overseas data transfers, immediately delete prompt information, disclose its Korean-language privacy policy, and verify and delete children's personal information.
In its newly revised privacy policy, DeepSeek established separate supplementary provisions for Korea and explicitly stated that it would process personal information in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act of Korea. The company also disclosed that user personal information would be transferred to four overseas entities?three in China and one in the United States?and stated that "users may refuse the transfer of their personal information."
DeepSeek also reported that it had implemented an "opt-out" function to guarantee user choice, as recommended by the commission. The opt-out function allows data subjects to explicitly express their refusal, enabling users to have their input data deleted and to prevent their data from being used for AI training.
Additionally, DeepSeek announced that it "does not provide services to children under the age of 14 and does not actively collect information from children."
However, regarding the recommendation to immediately delete prompt input data that has already been transferred to Volcano, a commission official stated, "This is something that can only be confirmed after receiving the relevant materials, so it has not yet been verified."
Currently, when searching for "DeepSeek" or its English name "deepseek" in the Google Play Store or Apple App Store, the app appears and can be downloaded.
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