DeepSeek collects keystroke data and more, storing it in Chinese servers
Is anyone actually surprised by this?
https://mashable.com/article/deepseek-ai-privacy-policy-keystroke-data-chinese-serversOpen linkView original on sh.itjust.works513
Comments325
DeepSeek does the same things that OpenAI does, but it's a foreign actor so OOooooOOWwwwooOOOO sCaRrRey!
Wait until they hear what data Instagram/Meta collects during use!
But they're a US company so it's ok.
Realistically what is the worst thing China is doing with your private data? Selling it? If you’re not a Chinese National, at least you don’t fall under their jurisdiction.
If you’re a U.S. citizen, with all the tech oligarchs cozying up to the current administration, I’d be a lot more concerned with Facebook/Twitter/Etc collecting your data.
Probably mapping out the extended support networks of democratic activists in Taiwan to prepare to throw them in jail after a forcible military takeover.
So democratic activists in Taiwan have extensive networks in the US?
I mean, you said it.
Extensive networks with their close ally? My pearls must be clutched!!
Networks with a foreign actor undermining national sovereignty, which financed several massacres in your country
My country? Not sure what you're talking about but I know that Taiwan deserves sovereignty. You don't? Surely you're not pro imperialism...
The CCP is significantly more oppressive, gives zero shits about human rights or trademarks or really anyone at all. The US at least pretends to care.
Bro you can stop that narrative. The truth is out now.
What truth? Who talks like this and thinks it means something?
For the past week the people of China and the United States, as well as other countries have been comparing notes. Debunking propaganda on both sides. Realizing that much of what we've all been told for years/decades, has been lies.
I'm ootl. What debunks have come out?
I'm not here to defend the Chinese government or anything, but there is an argument to be made that the US has an equivalency to each one of these things.
CCP officials at tech companies - NSA backdoors
Uyghur slaves - Prison labor aka war on drugs
Taiwan - Gaza/Literally any "3rd world" nation with oil
Censorship - Right wing media empires/red state bills targeted to downplay US atrocities taught in schools
Retaliation against protestors - Police brutality Social media censorship - Oligarchs owned social media
I think a lot of people are less falling for Chinese propaganda and more overcoming US propaganda.
With the caveat that we have tons of actual evidence for the US equivalent, whereas the claims that China does those things are usually "We absolutely swear they do bro" from the people who swore Hamas was raping babies or whatever.
If you think any of those are remotely the same, you're simply delusional.
No you wouldn't. If you were, you'd have listen to the many people that probably have corrected you on all those State Department talking points
That's never happened. And being that you haven't either, I think it's a fair guess that it won't anytime soon.
The US is in the process of deporting all its migrants and threatening invasions on half the world.
I get that gringos don't want to own up to their complicity by inaction but you oughta stop pontificating about how other governments are worse. Unless they're called Israel, they weren't before and they sure as fuck aren't now.
Get fucked, racist.
Lmaooo hurting gringos feelings is being racist? Y'all have had concentration camps for longer than you've been without them, you know their fucking addresses and they're still there.
Do forgive me for throwing y'all's opinions on racism in the dustbin.
You cannot be a serious leftist and pretend to be offended by a little "anti-white" rhetoric.
Based on what? The US imprisons more people, kills more people, tortures more people. The only way to argue that China is more oppressive is basically to start with the assumption they are and then work backwards to justify it.
I listed a handful of reasons above, of which no one has denied or refuted. Just downvoted.
Actually you didn't. You listed a bunch of accusations against China (which were refuted, you just ignored that), but you didn't even try to explain how that's more oppressive than the USA. Even if all your accusations were true, the US is still more oppressive.
I see you are sticking with the pack here and going with generic denial and ignoring my arguments rather than actually refuting them.
now we've got another refutopolis warrior.
What does that even mean?
That doesn't affect people not in china or not bordering china.
that's pure ideology.
Strawmanning the open source federated social media enthusiast crowd as unaware fans of meta?
As a US citizen, I prefer services that US consumer protections could apply to. (While we still have them, ahem.) I know that Chinese laws will not protect me from things a Chinese business does in China.
(What’s with the rude replies? Did I fail to notice what instance I’m on or something?)
As a chauvinist
Ftfy
This makes me sad, that we can’t engage in civil discussion about this. Why did you assume and not ask questions? Be curious, not judgmental.
To me it’s a question of laws. The laws of the U.S. at least somewhat constrain the people of my own country, and can prevent them from working against their own citizens. Like me.
Please be kind when replying.
That sinophobia isn't going to stoke itself!
Western authorities have been harvesting data for a few decades from social media so any complaint that singles out Chinese apps doing the same is obviously rooted in sinophobia.
The fact you think my joking about racists doing that is pathetic shows which side of that assertion you fall.
I'm not American so they are indeed a foreign actor.
Nope you can't run chatgpt locally.
I love that people think this is a solid own. Lest we forget Hong Kong, or an impending hot war in Taiwan or building out extradition systems with an expanding network of countries to forcibly repatriate and torture dissidents and human rights lawyers.
You used to not have to explain why authoritarianism was bad.
Edit: I would love to know the Pro side of what happened in Hong Kong, or the forced extradition regime, since evidently I'm clearly in the wrong in thinking those were bad. What am I missing?
It used to not be necessary because democracies used to have moral authority but since the revelations of Manning and Snowden non-Americans see no difference between giving our data to the USA or to China or any other. We also know from the reaction to the war in Ukraine and Gaza that human rights claims are only sometimes used.
When you can't even find things that China actually has done to complain about, so you have to start complaining about things they haven't done.
Anti terrorism is good, actually. I don't support people kicking seniors for speaking mandarin to try to bully a government into not prosecuting murderers in the mainland, which was the reason the protests happened (that and Washington money)
This "China's AI is taking your data and that's bad" is shockingly similar to "TikTok is taking your data and that's bad". Lots of US counterparts do the same thing, but I don't see (as much) media coverage about that.
Don Draper: "no no no, everyone else's cigarettes are dangerous. Lucky Strikes are... toasted."
The way I think of it is, I don't live in China, so regardless of my objections to their values or human rights abuses, why would CCP or an affiliated company care about me or ruin my life on the basis of or by abusing my data? A big part of why I care about privacy is I don't want to be filtering my every thought through consideration of whether the powers that be would approve, and US companies are way more relevant to that.
Sell to the highest bidder
These the excuses you start to make when you're losing. Not looking great for the US..
This is probably only a problem with the online version. In contrast to google and openAI they, like meta, let you download the model and run it offline, where they can't access any of this data I presume.
I've been running it locally using ollama, works completely offline, no keystroke data for anyone!
Just use little snitch, open snitch or simple wall depending on your operating system and block the outbound connection if one ever occurs
Seems legit! https://safing.io/blog/2022/04/11/portmaster-vs-simplewall/
Oh little snitch was just what I used when macOS was my main operating system. When I switched to windows I started using simple wall and I just recently was poking around for a Linux solution and I found open snitch
Right, the offline version (if you have the hardware to run it) is completely under your control, and no one can take that away from you. Honestly nice to see that happen, I thought it would take several years.
They all store data on Chinese servers?
Unironically quite a lot of them probably do because it's probably cheap and they have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to gEt ThE bEsT dEaL!
Anyone using DeepSeek as a service the same way proprietary LLMs like ChatGPT are used is missing the point. The game-changer isn’t that a Chinese company like DeepSeek can compete with OpenAI and its ilk—it’s that, thanks to DeepSeek, any organization with a few million dollars to train and host their own model can now compete with OpenAI.
On-prem vs. Cloud, basically. On-prem just magically got cheaper.
Onprem has always been cheaper. Cloud compute was the most successful marketing campaign I can think of.
Not when it's about LLMs.
Or open source groups can make a fully open repro of it: https://github.com/huggingface/open-r1
I'd like to look into that, how can I train an existing model further?
I'm only playing around with ollama, but like to do a bit more - mostly just to fulfill my needs to understand things - but have no idea where to start
You're going to have to learn python.
Here's a good overview: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/training
Python is not a problem
SW Dev is my job. Just never had real contact with AI before, besides playing around a bit.
Thank you very much for the link!!
Edit: thank you very much again, that was pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
Don't know how I missed to checkout huggingface. Thought of it always just as a github for models and didn't bother checking for docs...
But that's a great intro with simple tools/tutorials to get a grip on it, thanks!
No.
As opposed to Microsoft, Google, .. NSA, or GCHQ servers. Or all of the above.
"We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China"
Now you Americans know how we Europeans feel when Google, Amazon and Facebook store our information on American servers. Hint: The protective wall between Chinese servers and their government are about as good as the one between American servers and their government - at least for non-US citizens. The last thin veil of privacy for Eurpeans has been ripped to shreds by Trump last week.
What did he do? I know Trump does not like the GDPR, but did he sign something affecting it last week?
He killed the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Theoretically, no company is allowed to transfer data of European citizens to US-based servers anymore. Sadly, Ursula von der Leyen is lacking the balls to act on this.
Thanks, I did not know. I think you are referring to this: https://www.freevacy.com/news/noyb/trumps-actions-to-dismantle-pclob-threatens-eu-us-data-transfers/6088
To be completely honest... as an European I would be happy if they actually did make it so that no EU-US data transfer were allowed... we need to stop depending on all these US-based services... but like you said, they probably don't have the balls to pull the plug. Which makes me wonder if that board was actually really any protection at all for privacy or it had always been an empty shell used as an excuse on both sides just to keep up appearances and maintain the plug on.
I honestly think this could be a win for us. Worst case scenario, nothing really changes but some masks fall off and at least some people would stop acting under false pretense (which could open the doors for change). So I'm actually glad he did that.
Run it locally then
https://www.smartprix.com/bytes/how-to-run-deepseek-ai-locally-on-your-phone-2-methods/
Thanks, managed to have it installed locally bia pocket pal (termux was giving me errors constantly on compile). Out of curiosity, I made a very "interesting" prompt, and frankly I am not even surprised
EDIT: decided to be a little spicier, didn't fail to amuse me
This is mildly pedantic but you're not actually running Deepseek R1, you're running a 7B version of Qwen that's been fine-tuned on Deepseek R1 outputs. All of the "distilled" models are existing models trained on R1.
Nice catch. I'll be sure after do run the real thing
That so edgy, man. I bet all the girls in your high school think you're the raddest.
My gym sock captures human input too.
I input it into the sock.
If you think the American companies do anything different you're not paying attention and simply believing the propaganda.
Chinese company does what American companies have done for 25+ years now!
Is it time for REAL data privacy laws or are we just gonna keep playing whack-a-mole with Chinese tech companies that get us nowhere?
Our data's just too valuable for these parasites. Data privacy laws may eventually pass to compel software companies to store everything in US servers only.
Excellent Point. If that's the case though, then wouldn't other countries follow suit which still limits big tech's reach and makes them less profitable and less powerful? Idk. Guess we'll see how it plays out. Either way, I'm staying as far from those ecosystems as possible to at least try to mitigate some of what they do. I'll never be totally successful, genie is put of the bottle, but we can at least attempt.
I'm confused. Isn't "collecting keystroke data" just an alarmist way to describe text entry?
Maybe. They could also be doing things like paying attention to input cadence and typos/pre-send typo corrections to use as part of a fingerprint associated with the identifying information a user gives them when creating an account so that they can then attempt to detect the user elsewhere on the web whether they are using an identifying account or not.
So, basically using Facebook technology in their AI app?
You'll hear no arguments from me on that point, US tech companies are toxic af.
How far we've come
Not exactly. Timing between key presses can be used to identify people.
I am literally so paranoid I regularly vary my keysteoke rhythms and explore polyrhytmic techniques to create variations. Not even joking.
lol no. only the sounds of the keys can identify the keyboard's model
The goal is not to identify keyboard model. The goal is to identify person. And people tend to have something called habbits.
the chance of this is almost zero. if you are a dangerous cybercriminal, they will track your device down by a networking solution, wait until you leave it unattended and install a hardware-based spy device and capture evidence. No fbi agent will fuck around with keyboard sounds or movie bs like that
Ok, I see you are intentionally going in circles.
Not usually. Keystroke info is different than text input, like if you didn’t click onto any field and typed it would only be captured if keystroke are all being grabbed. It’s especially scary if you keep the app running in the bg and then type something and it still captures it. Not saying they’re doing that, but the privacy policy says they might.
The rhythm part is annoying, it’s commonly used to ID people even through things like ad blocks and dns blocks. Could also (in theory) be used to capture what people are typing just by hearing how they type.
this. i mean, the session logs for the prompt are kept at least for your user, right?
This is the full paragraph:
It looks to me that they are using it to identify the user uniquely, maybe also related to captcha to prevent bots (it's common practice to capture mouse and keyboard while resolving captchas to see if the movement is human-like).
Looks like there are more things I need to start randomizing and injecting with noise.
Yes.
This article is what US propaganda looks like folks. Mashable should be ashamed.
Literally all AI companies do this to run their services. Except you can actually download Deepseek and run it completely securely on your own devices. You know who doesn't allow that security? OpenAI and the other US companies currently being screwed.
It's a chinese company, where else would they store the data?
The balls.
I think its called a data lake, so they don't "store" it, its rather floating around there 🤪
These lakes are formed when the cloud is saturated and gives us data precipitation.
thanks for the great picture 👍
so here is the current cloud clima forecast:
The saturated clouds will rain into the data lakes that are already overspilling here and there into the ransomstreams already taking all soil in their way with them. During the day there will be security clouds preventing from visible rain only while during the night those same security clouds rain themselves all collected data to their homelake while their homelake security already is corrupted and spills over regulary.
As soon as the fort-cisc-pal-ocstricken-redm-ondams breach it'll gonna have floods with multi-exabyte waveheights and the ripples of the release will be felt over to far east china and the currents will circulate around the world multiple times causing damage and devastation in their wake around the world and eventually even reach connected orbit.
The floods will have the potential to also wash away and /or drown or choke all the big tech dinosaurs. Only small foss mammals and deep sea amphibics will survive this historic event.
... you kinda asked for it 😉 same as "they" kinda asked for it too. 🤔
Antarctica, clearly.
Same as Chrome's magic bar, or android keyboard no ? So in the end, does USA doing it good because "democracy" (never ever with napalm) when China is bad because human rights violation (USA never did anything like this) ?
Seriously this. Nothing that China is accused of doing is any worse than what i know America has done. If it's the Chinese Communist Party stealing your data at least you know it won't be used to inject ads everywhere you go on the internet
At least they're transparent about it, unlike american companies that hide behind convoluted terms of services and then sell the data behind your back but it's technically legal.
China's like "yeah we collect everything". I can appreciate the honesty.
I feel like Meta could do a ton more damage with my information than Tencent
Not excusing Chinese companies but everyone does the same shit. I bet a lot of US companies that behave the same or worse will be looking for trade barriers to protect their business so their interests will be stoking fear of Chinese competitors. I don't really give a shit which country is doing it, I am not buying what they are selling.
US companies have a stranglehold on government, education and business and are getting access to my families data despite my personal objections. Far more concerned about that than a Chinese service I have no intention of using.
Deepseek can at least be self hosted if you want AI in your life. I can happily live without it.
Nope, At least we can check DeepSeek's source code
Unlike OpenAI..... oops I meant ClosedAI
Collecting keystrokes is very different from collecting text inputted into fields. Keystroke rhythms is even more alarming as that is often used to identify users despite them using privacy settings, or used to collect what’s typed via audio collection.
Your argument that this is no different than other apps is complete crap. Don’t trust any app that collects that information
The argument stands, though.
Yes, not ALL other apps do that, but the comment was specifically talking about companies like Google and Meta... they definitely do collect incomplete strings from search forms (down to individual characters) when they display search suggestions, for example. They might not mention "keystrokes" in the legal text, but I don't see why they wouldn't be able to extrapolate your typing pattern since they do have the timing information which should be enough data to, at some level, profile it.
Keystrokes don’t have to be in a text field or input. That’s my point.
If I’m on say google. And I type anything into the field it’s definitely capturing it. You know this for no other reason then it would have to be with autocomplete as an option.
Keystroke capturing is the same as keylogging, aka anything typed even if it’s not into a place where you would assume it’s being seen by the app. Aka, if I had an app open in the background and was typing in my password, it would see and capture that.
They’re completely different things. While the privacy issues of US large tech companies are abundant and awful, there is a large difference between keystroke capturing and capturing input via fields. Especially when you’re agreeing to allow them to process and transfer or even sell that information.
But that's not what the terms on both Google/Meta and Deepseek say.
There's no term in their ToS saying Google/Meta restricts the data collection to forms, which means that if the ToS allowed them to collect them from forms (and as you admitted, we do know for a fact that they do), then it also allows them to collect it outside of forms. The reason I put the search suggestions as example is because it's one we CAN know (and thank you for agreeing on that), but that doesn't mean they don't do other captures at times we DON'T know... and also it's not the only place, Google owns several captcha mechanisms and capturing input patterns is common on those too (and captchas capture outside forms too!). Another obvious example is Google docs, another is Google translate... and again, those are only the obvious ones, we don't know if there are non-obvious ones.
In the other direction too, Deepseek terms don't say it does it outside of forms either. You are jumping into assumptions by saying it acts the same as a traditional keylogger and that the keystrokes are captured for "anything typed". For all we know the only place they might be capturing is when the user is in very specific steps of the login process, maybe for captcha purposes too, or specific forms for preloading results, etc. There's no reason you should trust they do it any less/more than Google/Meta does, the ToS in both have the same lack of information in that respect.
You can only make assumptions one way or the other, since the terms are not specific on what exactly they allow themselves to do, in the case of Google/Meta they're so sneaky that they avoid saying they do capture them (even though they do, as you yourself admitted), while in the case of Deepseek, even though they are a bit more specific by using the word "keystrokes", they also don't specify where/when/why (other than "to give you a seamless log-in experience and for security purposes" ..but that's also unclear wording).
HuggingChat is open source and lets you use DeepSeek. It also doesn't censor results like the main app (allegedly) does.
Nothing alleged about it. The main app wraps your prompt in a China-friendly one - at this point, I think people have mined the prompt itself? Scummy, sure, but it's also the same way that literally every other online AI service works.
I asked it about whether the takeover of Hong Kong was met with international criticism. First I saw an answer saying yes, and a few paragraphs of examples and elaborations.
A few minutes later the answer I already saw was replaced with "sorry, that's outside of my scope." I think with the flood of new traffic to Deepseek, they are scaling up reviews of chat content.
The same thing happened in ChatGPT when I asked something borderline NSFW.
Would be interested in any additional info on this.
Annoyingly, some of the censorship is baked into the model, it still won't answer all question about china.
This is amazing!
Very misleading, it lets you use the lighter, watered-down version (Deepseek 32B) compared to the large impressive model they have (Deepseek 671B)
Your devices keyboard app has been collecting all of your keystrokes.
Sure, but its open source and doesn't upload it anywhere. Also doesn't have internet permission
Any ChatAI logs your keystrokes and your inputs to work and update their LLM. The PP and TOS is the same and even better as those from the US competitors. DeepSeek is OpenSource
Anyway I prefer Andisearch and its PP, the best of all these big tech AIs.
Is Deepseek Open Source?
Hugging Face researchers are trying to build a more open version of DeepSeek’s AI ‘reasoning’ model
When will Hugging Face replace BLOOM's anti-libre software license?
haha, now do openai
I swear people do not understand how the internet works.
Anything you use on a remote server is going to be seen to some degree. They may or may not keep track of you, but you can't be surprised if they are. If you run the model locally, there is no indication it is sending anything anywhere. It runs using the same open source LLM tools that run all the other models you can run locally.
This is very much like someone doing surprised pikachu when they find out that facebook saves all the photos they upload to facebook or that gmail can read your email.
The telephone company knows your phone number!
other ai services do too. u might not realize it.
Yeah, uh... If you think that American companies aren't doing this same thing and handing your data over to the government without a warrant among other bad uses, I have some bad news for you. This is pretty much par for the course, and I'm pretty sure that we're witnessing a well financed negative media blitz happening to try and keep OpenAI from getting all of its spaghetti spilled. Watch for the government to try and ban deepseek for "national security" reasons soon.
Not gonna happen. Someone in China gave to Trump's inauguration fund, so nothing's getting banned.
Not surprised at all why would I? Don't act like other AI services is privacy focused. It's all same. THEY ALL COLLECT DATA.
But good thing about is deepseek is you can run locally unlike Closed AI Chat GPT. No need to use shitty app.
Chinese company uses servers located in China. More news at 11.
If I’m typing into the app, is that really collecting keystrokes?
And why is that an issue? It's typing data sent to a language model. What nefarious info might they be looking for? Learning to imitate humans? Fingerprinting? Making the best virtual keyboard asmr?
If you've got nothing to hide you don't have to worry ?
edit : For clarification, i consider "If you've got nothing to hide you don't have to worry" to be a naive argument, at best, in any privacy conversation, but I'm not averse to a well-reasoned argument to the contrary.
The wording here was unclear, what i mean to ask was:
"do you believe If you've got nothing to hide you don't have to worry ?"
Beware! Anything you type into a Google search is sent to Google's servers!
i mean....yes? that is generally how search platforms work.
I wouldn't recommend anybody use any google based stuff directly (or at all, if possible) but if you do, then sending the search query is generally what would happen.
That's the point. There is nothing strange or shady about the fact that things you type into DeepSeek.com are sent to DeepSeek.com. Obviously keystrokes you submit to a website are submitted to the website.
Oh yeah, the whole article could be reductively summed up as
"DeepSeek and all the other LLM services are almost as bad as each other, but we think deepseek is worse....because the Chinese government are known for doing bad things".
The title is factual, if a little clickbaity.
This though, it's not technically accurate, a lot of forms and input are done client side and then the resulting information is parceled up and sent to the server.
The actual keystroke data isn't normally sent.
Though this article doesn't go in to what kind of keystroke data is sent, if it was something more than just which keys in which order then that's perhaps an indicator that it's actively being collected for a reason, rather than just incidentally.
If you want to get really paranoid about such things it's known that you can you can do interesting things with actual keystroke data.
Also, afaict none of the the non-chinese services have specified that they don't do this.
Fair, but I don't know what exactly I'd be hiding here
Also fair.
I shouldn't have anything to hide, but I'm part of a group the current fascist leadership in government want's to eradicate, so hide I shall.
That said, I also feel like people acting like the remote server they are connected to is tracking what you do on it as some kind of surprise is so stupid. "Facebook is keeping track of the pictures I uploaded to it!!!!" There's a lot of stuff to complain about Facebook, google, or whoever, but them tracking stuff you send to them willingly isn't one of them.
I agree and i think a lot of people who espouse "nothing to hide" as an approach haven't actually thought it all the way through.
Then there's the fascists, dictators, oligarchs and other all around shitbags who just want the control.
This always surprises me, i originally thought it was because people didn't understand how these things work or how capitalist companies work.
More and more it seems like people don't care until it affects them, which is somewhat understandable, it takes effort to care about this stuff and a lot of people will never be directly affected by the consequences.
What i do still think is that the general population has no idea the extent of what can be done with all of the information they are volunteering.
That's very slowly changing but the usages of the data are also increasing at a much more rapid pace than before.
detective conan sure had a hard time cracking the case!
Oh the horror! Let's look at what our glorious spawns-of-techbro heroism has for us in store:
ChatGPT:
::: spoiler spoiler
Claude:
::: spoiler spoiler
So not only is your data "possibly" stored in one country, now there's a possibility of it being stored in many different countries. Where's the outcry for that?
Ok, so maybe your data being under the jurisdiction of another country is sus, right?
OH MY GOD SOUND THE ALARM!
ChatGPT:
::: spoiler spoiler
Claude: ::: spoiler spoiler
So not only can your data be subject to the authorities, but it's also handed out to 3rd parties (mind you, DeepSeek does the exact same, so why is it any surprise?).
🤦... You get the idea now, bother yourself with the privacy policies of the respective contemporaries and CTRL + F to "User Content" or "User Input".. Same fucking shit.
Yes, collecting keystrokes is probably the oddest thing here. To compare data farming giants with a decade and a half's worth of data collection to a startup in terms of data collection is so astronomically dumb.
I could go on but I'm bored now. Do your own research.
Not quite on topic but semi related... It's reasons like this that I started reading privacy policies many times before signing up for a service.
People would be surprised at some of the extremely concerning things are listed in there. Some is for good reason but some stuff is absolutely unnecessary and should be an issue for some people.
off-topic here as well, why stop at privacy policies? EULAs can get wilder, best such example of which is Apple:
The way this is worded, technically you're not allowed to use a Mac for designing a 3D printed nerf dart.
Lmaooooo great find. I wonder why exactly they had to clarify that? Maybe a semi Easter egg? Or a genuine concern? Thanks for sharing.
Just host it yourself?
By extension, anything that's not self hosted means 3rd party actors snooping. American, Chinese, whoever happens to operate that machine.
Building my entire data model around the Tienanmen Square copypasta. I can run this thing on a Raspberry Pi plugged into a particularly starchy potato and it reliably returns the only answer I've thought to ask it.
your raspberry pi will burn if you want to host an ai model on it. you need a high end gamer pc with at least 32 gb ram and rtx 4090
You can't just host the 632B model that the app uses lol
If you have the hardware, then yes, you can.
Ah, just acquire such hardware, very simple and anyone can do it without supply chain knowledge or advantage
Sorry but you are just talking assumptions without even having looked at the facts.
Its not cheap, but basically a single toptier gaming desktop with an additional graphics card (or 2) is literally all you need.
I know multiple people who work normal IT jobs that have already started on setting up their own. They plan on running them for their whole family, many users at a time from the same machine.
Here is someone who got it to work on a cluster of mac-minis. Again not cheap, but clearly within dedicated consumer enthusiast reach. https://digialps.com/deepseek-v3-on-m4-mac-blazing-fast-inference-on-apple-silicon/
And this is before even considering how fast open source moves, i am expecting quantized models which can have double speed for negligible quality impact any second now.
You can run the smaller models on your desktop though
as opposed to OpenAI which also stores keystrokes and then sells them to anyone who'd pay?
Oh my, just wait until you learn what Facebook and Google do...
I run it locally on a 4080, how do they capture my keystrokes?
No idea, have you monitored the package / container for network activity?
Perhaps this refers to other clients not running the model locally.
It doesn't. They run using stuff like Ollama or other LLM tools, all of the hobbyist ones are open source. All the model is is the inputs, node weights and connections, and outputs.
LLMs, or neural nets at large, are kind of a "black box" but there's no actual code that gets executed from the model when you run them, it's just processed by the host software based on the rules for how these work. The "black box" part is mostly because these are so complex we don't actually know exactly what it is doing or how it output answers, only that it works to a degree. It's a digital representation of analog brains.
People have also been doing a ton of hacking at it, retraining, and other modifications that would show anything like that if it could exist.
Yeah I've not had much of a deep dive into anything "ai" - closest thing I've got is a Google Coral monitoring my cameras. My current GPU selection is rather limited - sold my 1080ti and currently have a 3070 in my gaming rig + an un used 1660 which would run out of vram / be limited in what models they could run. Really not looking to run out and grab another card with more vram to play with either, maybe in a few years.
So the article is referring to the mobile app, and therefore would not have anything to do with someone running this model at home on their own hardware. I've not looked at DeepSeek's repo yet but assuming there isn't anything other than the model in the repo people need to calm down.
edit: deepstack to deepseek...
Yea, I am looking for a deep analysis of this as well
Are you looking for a deep learning of this as well?
Are you running a quantized model or one of the distilled ones?
I feel safer knowing that my data is not in a country where the company can use it against me
I'm safer knowing that my data is safe at home.
Chinese companies can use that data against you as well..
China isn't going to come get me because Trump and his cronies don't like my lifestyle
Exactly. I'm queer. I'm not scared of China, even if they were doing the same thing the US currently is. Because only one of those actually effects the rights I have and what I do in my day-to-day.
I do not understand how the average person does not realize that.
Countries share information though. And it is not below a fascist US to give China some nice trade deals for detailed information on queer US-Americans. Nor is it for China to accept such a deal.
Well, this is definitely a valid reason, and I really hope you stay strong and take your country back sooner than later.
I was more thinking about active manipulation and disinformation campaigns. They work by getting as much data from people as possible to find which people need to be targeted how to get the results you want.
Where is this country that can't use your data against you?
They should store the data in US servers like OpenAI does. Apparently then Mashable won't write an article about it.
The criticism thrown at DeepSeek in the past days is just as applicable to American AI models. But when that was brought up it in the past it was "making things political".
At least I can run DeepSeek locally.
Yes? Is it a surprise that a Chinese company stores it's data on a Chinese server?
US and the west: .... Spying is not acceptable! .... except if our companies are doing it
Doubtful, since it's both open source and you can run it locally. This seems more like a smear piece.
This article is about the app, which does not run the model locally. Why would you doubt that a Chinese app which openly claims they send your data to China, actually does so?
It seems like a smear piece because it makes it sound like DeepSeek is doing something that the others aren't, while the truth is that ever single on of them collects your data.
At best, it's disingenuous. At worst, with the ability to run locally, it's a blatant lie.
What would you have preferred? "Most apps sell your data, news at 11"? Would anyone care if it was written like that?
Ah yes, selling your integrity for clicks and pushing propaganda for cash, welcome to the information age.
I think you're incorrectly assuming that everyone knows they all do it. I see nothing wrong with raising awareness.
Did they become american company?
Well, at least models are downloadable.
Get it all you can, nvidia's already lobbying to make them a security risk, competition is bad for business.
nvidia is one of the greediest companies rn
All public companies by definition have to be greedy it's unfortunate but it's how capitalism works.
nvidia takes that to a whole new level
Unfortunately, we have a lot of that unprecedented stuff going around. The whole damn world is three corporations in a trechcoat and they're increasingly running governments.
Yes, I’m going to be lectured on privacy by people who are still on twitter.
I trust DeepSeek Open Source if it allows me to copy and review it. I don't trust
OpenAI like ChatGPT.Is Deepseek Open Source?
Hugging Face researchers are trying to build a more open version of DeepSeek’s AI ‘reasoning’ model
The runner is open source, and that's what matter in this discussion. If you host the model on your own servers, you can ensure that no corporation (american or Chinese) has access to your data. Access to the training code and data is irrelevant here.
The guys at HF (and many others) appear to have a different understanding of Open Source.
As the Open Source AI definition says, among others:
These three components -data, code, parameter- shall be released under the same condition.
Users have been shown that both governments are untrustworthy so what the fuck are we supposed to do?
Am I supposed to not read this article as panic? I know this is Mashable but the media overall is no longer unbiased and now there’s gonna be more gremlins to watch for in pro-US corpo AI propaganda and media ownership having stakes in AI.
Well, only one of those governments can actually do anything to me. Hint: it's the one I live under
You think other governments can't reach you? Did you miss the whole "election interference" thing? Have you never heard of propaganda?
Okay, but they can't literally bust down my door and kill me.
No, but they can manipulate the public's perception of political reality to the point that someone gets elected who will bust your door down and kill you, because a bunch of people who don't have time to make figuring out the news into a part-time job decided that that person would be able to make eggs cheaper and the other guy's son was really into hookers or something, and also he was old and wasn't "fixing the border."
Just as a random example.
(To be clear, I don't have any reason to think specifically that TikTok or China was involved in getting Trump elected. I'm just saying that allowing any adversary, whether that's China or that's the GOP's social media psyop department, to have control over American's social media landscape, will absolutely have an impact on you personally, and already has.)
Okay but now we aren't really talking about privacy anymore, are we? We're talking about the monopolization of social media by a few corporations as we're siloed into platforms. Bad, for sure, but a different problem.
The election interference is coming from inside the house and privacy is only tangentially related to a larger problem.
I'll continue to be more worried that my DMs will be used to put me in prison.
No, not legally anyway.
China is not illegally busting down US residents' doors and killing them lol
Damn, lemme tell the see see pee Jimmy Bob in Missisota caught on. Time to call off the wushu assassins.
Get the fuck over yourselves lmao
Ok, so they'll ban it under that guise to appease US companys, same as TikTok. I really didn't care about TikTok since it's all brain rot to me but this might actually be a tool I'll use if it's as efficient as they say.
Good thing I can run it locally, I guess.
Oh yeah and ChatGPT doesn’t
Assuming that DeepSeek really is logging keystrokes (they provided no evidence: who were they quoting?), that is unfortunately not uncommon. As shown by their TikTok pearl clutching, corporate media regularly goes for maximalist cold war fearmongering.
https://platform.deepseek.com/downloads/DeepSeek%20Privacy%20Policy.html
Ctrl-F "rhythm"
I've noticed that this "there is no proof!" or "where's the evidence?" all of a sudden has become popular. You have people saying it even when they're talking about a very specific statement of a fact that's very specifically and easily verifiable.
Completely true. A lot of web sites monitor everything you do on them, and can play it back for anyone who's curious about optimizing the UX or for any other less innocent reason. Generally I think there's not much specific in their privacy policy about it when they do. It's not surprising that this one is also doing that, accompanied by really a pretty minor line in their privacy policy to go along with it, I completely agree with you here.
Personally, I wish the corporate media would pearl-clutch a little bit more about how explicitly malicious to our interests our computing devices have become. "Everyone does it, so it's not a big deal after all" is a common take to have, but it's the exact opposite of the one that I personally have on it.
That’s not my take, and I agree with you.
Well, you did say it was "pearl clutching" and "fearmongering." My point is, they should be clutching pearls, and fear should be mongered. Arguably, at all the social media companies including TikTok.
I actually do agree that TikTok is worse, but it's hardly the point. We can be alarmed about all of them, especially since the US ones are now in the hands of an overtly evil tyrannical government instead of merely the sociopathic profit-minded corporatocracy they were in before.
You're literally talking to people in a privacy forum hosted outside of corporate social media... and you think people don't agree with you. We wouldn't fucking be here if we weren't already on the same page about such issues.
That's on you, dude.
I'm talking to someone in a privacy forum hosted outside of corporate social media who described reports about privacy violations committed by a privacy-invasive social media app as pearl-clutching and fearmongering.
I'm not sure what your deal is, here, but I'm not into it. I feel like what I said was pretty straightforward and you're determined to gin up some kind of disagreement, where I'm supposed to say that corporate media's reporting on privacy isn't bad, or something.
Privacy good, corporate privacy invasion bad. Corporate media underreporting of privacy violations bad. Hopefully that makes sense, and we can agree on it. I'm not into whatever argument you're attempting to create about it.
We never had an argument other than you keep positing that people don't agree with this while they're busy explaining to you that yes, they actually do, and you keep choosing to ignore that. "Corporate media underreporting of privacy violations bad" is literally what I spent several paragraphs explaining that you took as "yelling" and "disagreement."
...but keep on arguing with people who actually agree with you and telling yourself they don't.
Got it. Yeah, fair enough. What I was aiming to do, more or less, was ask for clarification, but I definitely see how it could come across as me trying to continue the argument when he was saying that he already agreed with me. I think you hopping into it with a big italic and bold wall of text on the thing that apparently all three of us already agree on only confused the issue further.
Anyway, sounds like we're all on the same page. Cool.
...and I think that's you completely misreading what people are saying.
We're saying that it's bunk for the corporate media to portray it as this dangerous thing when they refuse to report similarly on US companies doing the same with the same ferocity.
I think most people agree with you, that our privacy protections are fucking abysmal and no company should be being allowed to do this stuff. Hell, that's like the entire thrust of Ed Zitron's entire fucking blog: that none of these companies should get away with this.
It's like when Facebook got fined a paltry sum for being caught lying about their video metrics and literally putting businesses like CollegeHumor out of business because they "pivoted to facebook video" to grab those high metrics... which never materialized because Facebook was ratfucking lying to people. They should have been shut down and put out of business for that, not fined less than they made ripping off people.
People are sick of the companies here getting a pass, and the media gives them a pass. It's more that you can't make freaked out headlines like this about TikTok and DeepSeek and not understand that everyone is rolling their fucking eyes because we're all like "it's no worse than what US companies already do to us." That doesn't mean we like it or are okay with it. It means we're rolling our eyes at a fucking insipid news media that's obviously lying to us for the sake of private American companies profit, not because they care about rightfully informing American citizentry about what is happening.
All of us fucking hate it, but what the fuck do you expect us as individuals to do about it? Folks like me have been voting Blue for 25 fucking years with fuck-all to show for it on issues like these. So why's it our job to explain that we don't support it, we just think it's dumb as fuck when a foreign company is doing the same thing and now suddenly that's evil, but our guys doing it is somehow fine. What we have issue with is the hypocrisy.
Dude, why is this guy getting so upset about the suggestion that people should be alarmed both by TikTok and also by the malicious behavior of all the other social media companies? And that the media should report more on it? Why is he yelling so much at me for making what I thought was that fairly reasonable suggestion?
Oh. Um... what? What does that... okay.
Edit: Oh, also, you were unnecessarily doing a bunch of obedience to the establishment if you've been voting blue for 25 years. Back in the Bill Clinton era, the parties really were practically indistinguishable, and there were other realistic options like Ralph Nader and Ron Paul on the table who were genuinely pretty good. They got creamed by FPTP, but right around the year 2000 was a time when almost anyone could see that the good options were not within either major party. Al Gore being a pretty obvious and rare exception. The calculus changed a lot with the last few elections, where the Republicans became such an objectively terrifying option that voting for the Democrat just so they wouldn't get into office became a necessary strategy if you care about the country. In my opinion.
I literally explained it pretty clearly.
At this point its clear you want to misunderstand.
Interesting that you took a few paragraphs with a handful of explitives thrown in as "yelling."
I assumed that they couldn’t have gotten that from the privacy policy itself, because I’d never seen one be so explicit.
They are quoting DeepSeek's privacy policy. They say this before and after the first quote, and also link the policy at the top of the article.
Let's be honest, ChatGPT is also logging keystrokes.
Yes. I also like how the alarming take on it is not "People are typing their passwords / medical histories / employer's source code into ChatGPT and from there it goes straight into the training data not only to be stored forever in the corpus, but also sometimes, to be extracted at a later date by any yahoo who knows the way to tease it back out from ChatGPT via the right carefully crafted prompting!"
But instead it is "When you type things, they can see what you type! The keystrokes!"
And they probably aren't even doing that. More likely, it's just bot prevention.
I wouldn't be so sure. China is at the world's forefront of automated techniques to be able to spy on and manipulate people through their own devices at massive scale. If they had some semi-workable technology to fingerprint individuals through their typing patterns, in conjunction with fingerprinting the devices they were using through other means, that would make perfect sense to me.
I don't think it is especially a concern for Deepseek specifically, for reasons discussed elsewhere in the comments. That one particular aspect of the privacy issue is probably being overblown, when there are other adjacent privacy and security concerns that are a lot more pressing. Honestly, that one particular detail isn't really proven simply because it's in the privacy policy, and even if they are doing something like that, its inclusion or not in this particular privacy policy or this app isn't the particularly notable part about it.
Could they? Probably. Would it be valuable to an AI company? Probably not. Like most startups, they're mostly shipping a minimal product as quick as possible.
they are actually training on this data (potentially). Its a fact. Only if you use some kind of special corporate license then they will not train on the data. (and you need to trust them on that)
maybe they harvest passwords on the side?
It doesn’t have access to all your keystrokes. An app can only harvest the keystrokes typed into it.
Oh my god, that is such stupid detail to get hung up on then. There are actual problems with it like censorship and consequent potential untrustworthiness of the answers and THIS is what they decide is the worst thing.
no sh*t! now tell me, not that it's correct, but what does the chinese intelligence apparatus can do to me vs. what the u.s. intelligence apparatus (which has been collecting intelligence about me since i'm alive) can do to me?
As a queer woman in the US, I currently care infinitely more what the US gov and companies track about me than what China does.
They both can and frequently do influence the information you are exposed to on social media to influence your decision making. Not you specifically, unless you someone very important, but your demographic in a broader sence. The more data they have on you, the more effective this process is.
and that's what superpowers do, but living in a third world country i'm yet to see the chinese putsch us as the u.s. did during the cold war and beyond, with all due consequences. sorry about my lack of goodwill towards the department of state.
The funny thing is that I would realistically only care about, for example, the Russian government collecting my data if their oligarchy collaborated with my government's oligarchy against my and the population's interest (which I guess in this case is significantly more likely than China)
You know what they say about assertions made without evidence.
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Like every app you have doesn't collect keystrokes data?
The Chinese now have data on my Linux vm and my curiosity about sweet potato and sweet potato recipe. They’re coming for me now!
This is my total lack of surprise.
Yeah whatever, everyone collects it now. Since it gets stored by a fascist state either way, who gives a fuck?
yeah def not our own country going after privacy...
And you're making it easy for them if you don't give a fuck.
It's amazing how Putin has become the Satan figure of the American Civil Religion, personally responsible for all evil in the world.
Er... no, he's just responsible for all that evil he's unabashedly doing right now. And is working very closely with the fascist party in our government. As a result, he's become an important figure in the political landscape of the US.
Yes, and all evil is secretly him. Just like you say, secretly he's working with everyone bad in the USA, and he's secretly a very important figure in US politics. Just like he's secretly behind me stubbing my toe.
... Is this a bit? Because thats some unhinged shit to believe if you're being serious.
Just to be clear here, Putin isn't responsible for all the worlds evils, that's just... well, dumb. Sorry but like, who in their right mind could believe that? Seriously, I don't know how you could possibly arrive at that conclusion.
And hell, he's not even responsible for all the evils in the US. But he's very openly and publicly working with the far right parties here, who are in their turn very open about working with him, and that makes him a very relevant current figure. Not... sure what part of that is a revelation.
We are now at a time where US blocks China services in order to protect their companies
Just like many US services are banned in China in Order to protect their companies
So, I hope no surprise..
———
Its or their for countries?
Edit: I have chosen their
This make the news only because it's going to chinese servers. Didn't see anything like that about ChatGPT or the one made by Google.
They're desperate to manufacture consent against their competition
Idk DeepSeek probably just stores things in the history of my Terminal window.
Isn't it open source? If so it should be near trivial to get rid of all of that.
If it's closed source I wouldn't touch it with a tej foot pole, it's the same reason I rarely use chat gpt, it's just freely giving away your personal data to open AI.
No, this is just propaganda
So I won't use this for the same reason I don't use any AI? Cool
This is why you run stuff locally or not at all.
Time to make up a conspiracy about key leading figures, and laugh as they disappear each other.
Boo!
Question: if we bridge 2 ais and let them talk to one another, will they eventually poison each other with gibberish bullshit?
Not in the way you think. They aren't constantly training when interacting, that would be way more inefficient than what US AI companies have been doing.
It might be added to the training data, but a lot of training data now is apparently synthetic and generated by other models because while you might get garbage, it gives more control over the type of data and shape it takes, which makes it more efficient to train for specific domains.
No I’m not surprised at all. This is necessary for any kind of auto save and auto complete. Not happy about my shit being stored in China, but “collects every keystroke” isn’t really news anymore.
If you’re worried about this kind of behavior, don’t use any website with auto save or auto complete, period.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is the accusation that they collect keystroke data from outside the app if you have it installed?
I haven't seen any indication of that, no.
It's not possible unless deepseek have accessbility permission or Deepseek become Keyboard app instead of AI app xD.
Yes, that is how these generative AI imementations work.
Let the FUD begin!
Let the witch hunt begin.
Better for my data to be in China than in the US
it is open-source, if they did something like this, we would know it for sure
Cool. I'd rather China have it than some American megacorp.
I trust China more.
Which one to trust more is at least debatable. In the end, neither can be trusted.
It's not really trust. It's more like hate. I hate this country. I hate what it's turned into. I hate the oligarchy. I hate the captured politicians. I hate that the supposed opposition to actual fascists is a bunch of whinging cunts who's primary concerns are about rules and norms. I hate that we are everything our propaganda told us about the rest of the world. I hate that our entire economic system is just a jenga stack of pyramid schemes.
We are a failed state. And if what I type on my phone helps our geopolitical "adversaries" get even 1 human hairs worth of advantage on this shithole then I'll give it gladly.
I don't see this as the USA turning into China. China has many problematic aspects, and being an immigrant or an LGBTQ+ person in China is probably not fun, but China at this point is less stupid and understands competitiveness. China would not defund all its science overnight, hamstring its technology and trash its whole economy with tariffs on goods it cannot produce domestically, withdraw vaccines in the face of new epidemics, and cancel sustainable energy projects and funding while denying climate science. The new US Government is just shooting the country in the foot again and again.
Sees America doing American things in an extremely American way:
"What are we, a bunch of Asians!"
That doesn't make any sense, though. The PRC has a Socialist Market Economy, while the US is diving into Neoliberalism and austerity, and relies on Financial Capital (and Imperialism, by extension) while China relies on Industrial Capital.
I want them to win. And they will. Short of global nuclear war they can't lose. Venture capital can't even dream of competing with central planning. Not even a question.
"I get not bootlicking America, so long as you still accept that America is better than everyone else"
Lol