DeepSeek: China’s AI Breakthrough or a Privacy Disaster?
China’s latest AI sensation, DeepSeek, has taken the tech world by storm, and not just for its impressive capabilities. In record time, this startup has climbed the app charts, putting pressure on established players like OpenAI. What makes DeepSeek stand out is its claim of delivering performance comparable to Western AI models while requiring significantly fewer resources. Sounds too good to be true? Perhaps, because a massive security flaw has already exposed serious weaknesses in how DeepSeek handles data privacy.
The Security Breach: An Open Database for the World to See
Cybersecurity researchers at a major cloud security firm recently made a shocking discovery. A critical ClickHouse database belonging to DeepSeek was left openly accessible on the internet without any authentication. This database contained over a million records, including user inputs, API keys, and internal backend data. In plain terms, anyone who stumbled upon the link had unrestricted access to highly sensitive information.
Even more alarming, the researchers not only had access to the data but also full control over the entire database. If they had been malicious actors, they could have copied, altered, or deleted the records without DeepSeek ever knowing. And here is where the real scandal begins.
No Official Security Contact
Once the security breach was identified, the researchers attempted to contact DeepSeek, a task that turned out to be far more difficult than expected. The company has no official security point of contact, no bug bounty program, and no public way to report vulnerabilities. Desperate to alert the company, the researchers resorted to sending messages to DeepSeek email addresses and LinkedIn profiles they could find. They received no response. However, within 30 minutes of their outreach, DeepSeek quietly secured the database. Whether unauthorized parties had accessed or downloaded the data before it was locked down remains an open question.
Data Privacy? What Privacy?
This incident raises serious concerns about trusting an AI model that operates like a black box. As DeepSeek continues to dominate app rankings and shake up the stock market, an essential question looms. Where did it source its training data? Was it trained using publicly available information, or did it scrape unauthorized data? More importantly, how will it handle user data in the future?
DeepSeek: The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
I consider DeepSeek to be highly problematic. There is no transparency regarding where its training data comes from, meaning no one really knows what kind of information has been fed into the system. And if a company is already this careless with its most basic security obligations, protecting its users’ data, I have zero confidence that they will suddenly become privacy conscious in the future. What is even more concerning is that China is now in a position to collect knowledge it should never have access to. AI chat interactions are not just casual conversations. People share deeply personal, sensitive, and sometimes even legally significant information. Any company operating such a service can, of course, build highly detailed profiles on its users. If you genuinely believe that is not happening here, you probably also believe in the independence of Chinese tech firms.
Now, I could say that the CIA is not already monitoring US and EU AI companies, but that would imply intelligence agencies are interested in data, which, of course, is just ridiculous, right? Which brings us to the real issue. AI chat models are data goldmines unless they run locally. And therein lies the problem. Running a large language model on your own machine requires significant GPU power, which the average user simply does not have. As a result, most people remain dependent on cloud-based AI services, which at the end of the day do what they do best, collect, store, and analyze. DeepSeek is just another example of how recklessly people hand over their most sensitive data to a black box, trusting that the companies running these machines will somehow adhere to ethical principles. Spoiler alert, they will not.
Every business should consider running large language models on their own servers with the necessary GPU power. This is the only way to ensure that sensitive data stays within the company and does not end up in the hands of external providers. Naturally, a proper firewall should be in place to prevent unauthorized access. Software that simply requires an API key sends all processed data directly to the provider, making it impossible to maintain full control over information security.
AI-powered image processing software presents another major risk. These tools gain insights into personal photos, videos, and other private content, which ultimately contributes to an even more detailed profile of you as an individual. The more data a company collects, the easier it becomes to predict, manipulate, and influence behavior. Be mindful of who you are providing access to your data.