5th February, 2025
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DeepSeek: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”
Be informed
… about matters relating to data security, risk management, and emerging issues that will be relevant to your organisation and its leadership team.
Even if I didn’t work with assistants in different countries and continents, keeping an eye on career futures and staying attuned to matters of relevance to your executives – and, by extension, to you – I’d find this fascinating.
I’ve written a couple of previous posts about DeepSeek, which emerged as an AI disruptor on Jan 20/25. You’ll also find more on my website.
Today, we have the following from BNN Bloomberg, in an article by Byron Tau of The Associated Press.
🔥”The website of the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, whose chatbot became the most downloaded app in the United States, has computer code that could send some user login information to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company that has been barred from operating in the United States, security researchers say.”
Kudos to Feroot Security, a Canadian cybersecurity company, and its people for identifying and flagging the coding referenced above.
It’s worth noting Associated Press reported researchers have not observed data transferred to the Chinese telecom, and that analyses to date are specific to DeepSeek’s web version. We don’t yet know of any analyses of the mobile app version. However, we’re told analysts couldn’t rule out transfer of web users’ data.
Feroot CEO Ivan Tsarynny was quoted in this article as saying, “It’s hard to believe that something like this was accidental. There are so many unusual things to this. You know that saying `Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’? In this instance, there’s a lot of smoke”.
I’ve embedded the link to Mr. Tau’s article above and here. If you’d like to catch up on my earlier articles on DeepSeek, here are the links.
- Jan 28/25: DeepSeek: disrupting GenAI and stock markets
- Jan 31/25: Governments have begun scrutinizing DeepSeek’s privacy controls