DeepSeek app, safe to use?
From a WhatsApp chat with a good friend earlier this week…
Good morning my friend! Jumping on the topical bandwagon… DeepSeek app, safe to use?
Good morning Chief, yeah - just assume they will train on your data and usage activity (safe assumption for most services!)
Ta. As long as it’s not training itself on the contents of my phone. And TBH, I wish they learned more from usage; the amount of time I’ve spent telling Gemini off.
As for the app itself, here’s an “at a glance” (shallow but factual) assessment: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.deepseek.chat/latest/
It’s telling me to kill any cyber security experts I know. 🤷 Don’t open any emails that smell of almonds!
But i probably would in a fit of Homer Simpson scent hypnosis…”Allllmmmoondds..mmm”
And this morning, I read that the Italian Data Privacy office instructed the delisting of the Deepseek app from the Apple and Google app stores.
The reason?
Insufficient information in response to their questions about how the service processes user data and what data was used to train the model (and what permissions were sought from data subjects).
I’m using hosted Deepseek models with my AI pair programmer (aider) for coding via OpenRouter. In that context, my first impressions are positive. Plus, OpenRouter gives me the option to route all my inference requests to a Deepseek provider that makes privacy promises I prefer.
P.S Did you clock the comment from my friend? “I wish they learned more from my usage”. I suspect heavy AI users would happily pay for this to be the case. I know I would since it would reduce roundtrips, which saves time and tokens ($$).
