11 ms·

Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek

40 points by thm 2y ago

whimsicalism 2y ago
EU doing what it knows best
- andy_ppp 2y ago
  GDPR is quite a sensible set of rules to be honest, if you want to understand the basics most of it comes down to 1) have a person you can contact in an organisation about your data 2) store people’s personal information as securely as if it’s credit card data 3) you have to be clear about what you’re doing with data from people in the EU and not store said data on servers outside the EU. All seems reasonable to me!
  - immibis 2y ago
    US websites have been quite successful in fearmongering about it - either "oh no, the EU forced us to put this mess of annoying popups on our page" or "oh no, the EU forced us to block our own website from it"
    - zbshqoa 2y ago
      While I'm not necessarily against GDPR and regulations, is undeniable that the regulatory landscape in Europe has been preventing innovation. In fact it's tech market is predominantly dominated by US tech companies (and probably soon Chinese ones as well)
      - frabert 2y ago
        I'll try and spin it a different way -- What if the US and China had been unfairly taking advantage of their lax rules to bring innovation to the damage of their (and other countries') citizens, much like China has been unfairly exploiting its own lower standards of living and personal freedom to gain advantage in terms of manufacturing power against the US and Europe?
        EGreg 2y ago
        Unfairly? That’s sort of a weird way of putting it! Look at these immigrants to USA “unfairly” exploiting their own relative poverty and lower standards of living and entertainment to outcompete regular Americans! The tiger moms also “unfairly” use their higher standards of achievement for their kids to send them to get piano lessons and KUMON centers instead of hanging out with their friends in the park. It’s so unfair! We have to restrict their opportunities. Maybe have quotas at the universities… It sounds a bit like that but on an international scale. I mean, one could argue it is far more unfair that they are behind in standards of living in the first place, what with all the Western imperialism and opium wars and British Raj. In India it is more unfair that Britain helped the East India company and engineered famines in the 1700s through 1940s through requisitioning grain, than the “unfairness” of Indian H1B visa workers “taking our jobs” now in a boomerang. ====== The only sense of “fairness” that makes any coherent sense here is that advanced countries should all cooperate to have minimum standards of living and human rights for everyone in them. Well, if we are going to cooperate on that, we may as well cooperate on non-proliferation of dangerous AI, as we successfully did with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and CFCs. But the upsides of AI are “too sweet” (to quote nuclear researchers) to actually do cooperation, so we do competition instead. What is “unfair” about competition by exploiting lower standards of living or different culture, if you rule out cooperation?
        frabert 2y ago
        I was talking "fairness" from the point of view of the EU in this case, and it is the exact sense that you are delineating in your addendum at the end of the comment. It is "unfair" that a country gets to run circles around me because it completely ignores things that I consider important rights that my citizens fought for -- sane working hours, right to have my data kept to myself, right to express discontent against the government
        nickpp 2y ago
        > sane working hours So it's "unfair" when others work harder than us?! > right to express discontent against the government Last time I checked, the USA had "freer" speech than the EU.
      - cbg0 2y ago
        While companies will always follow the path of least resistance and prefer as little regulation as possible to make money without a lot of headaches, most people will prefer their privacy be respected and their data not sold-off without their approval or used in undocumented ways, even if it leads to less innovation in the corporate landscape.
      - tmnvdb 2y ago
        Regulation is only a small part of the story. Keep in mind that GDPR was implemented in 2018, long after Europe lost the tech battle. The lack of a unified (financial) service sector and hence a very weak and fragmented private capital market (-> VC ecosystem) is a bigger problem. Most funding is from risk-averse banks and slow-moving governments. Many EU based startups move to silicon valley for access to financing.
        nickpp 2y ago
        There are other regulations making entrepreneurship quasi-impossible in the EU, not just GDPR. For example employment laws are thought for big, ossified companies, not lean and agile startups.
        tmnvdb 2y ago
        That is partly true, though not equally so in every country (Denmark is a positive example - as usual). Note that this kind of regulation is done on the national level and isn't strictly related to EU membership. On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers. Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation. If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding. Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.
      - tokai 2y ago
        A bit like a helmet prevents the pavement innovating your skull.
        nickpp 2y ago
        There are countries that decided against compulsory helmet laws for bikers on the basis that biking health benefits outweigh the risks. When you raise barriers to an activity, even if for a good cause, you may end up losing more than you gain.
        tokai 2y ago
        The analogy was about motorcycle helmets, so no.
        tmnvdb 2y ago
        The country with by far the highest number of people riding a bike (The Netherlands) does not have any helmet rules.
        sandermvanvliet 2y ago
        But the number of incidents with head injuries is increasing because more (elderly) people are riding e-bikes for longer than they would have a normal bike. As reaction times slow with age this is not a great combo with a faster bike which is a cause to more incidents. There is a big push currently for getting helmet rules adopted similar to how Denmark did this
      - immibis 2y ago
        What do you consider innovation? Was a certain regulation the reason DeepSeek-R1 didn't happen in Europe?
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    4. have a system for tracking every single dataset you have lying around including ones that might just be for experiments and in a different format and purge people who have requested to be forgotten or be fined 10s of thousands of dollars 5. frequent new legal interpretations that become the basis of enforcement and then you have to rearchitect the whole way you were handling data always good to impose onerous rules on R&D when you are critically losing the R&D and capital race
    - michaeljx 2y ago
      4. If it is personal data, you have to know where they came from, where they are stored and why. If you don't want to do that, then invest the minimal effort it takes to anonymize them during ingestion and then you can do whatever you want with them. 5. Now that is just false, or you have some really bad architects, if you are so sensitive to new legal interpretation (which there haven't been any significant ones)
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
        Why does everything needs to be pro EU or anti EU. Yes, consumer privacy is more protected in EU. And yes it has directly caused EU R&D budget to become significantly smaller. And yes it has led to ad revenue decrease and created more problem for small companies who can't use non targeted ad. If you are arguing against any of these, for which there are lot of data I think you are not up for discussion.
        mftrhu 2y ago
        Where is the GP taking a pro-EU or anti-EU stance? Where are they arguing against "ad revenue decrease" which "created more problem for small companies", or the impact of GDPR on the EU R&D budget?
        Ylpertnodi 2y ago
- oulipo 2y ago
  Protecting their citizens
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    they’ll only be truly safe when their gdp per capita is a full half of the US
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      No worries until then we will have our great wall of Europe, as US grows to distaste any remaining allies.
      - whimsicalism 2y ago
        No distaste for Europe, I just feel mildly sorry for what you are inflicting on yourself. The US has and will come to your defense, but we can’t defend you all from self-inflicted wealth-destroying policies.
        bbzealot 2y ago
        > The US has and will come to your defense While threatening tariffs and a hostile takeover of Greenland?
        whimsicalism 2y ago
        1. Yes, we are quite literally defending you while doing those things right now. 2. Trump has bad policies yes, although I hadn’t heard anything about an actual military takeover of Greenland. 3. It’s not as if EU doesn’t have tariffs on the Us already, for instance you all are very protective of the auto industry as well as your domestic farmers, just to name a few. I think tariffs are bad policy on both sides of the atlantic
- cbg0 2y ago
  Enforcing data privacy laws? Sounds good to most citizens, 99% of which are not the entrepreneurs having to deal with the regulations.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    what percentage of EU citizens don’t use goods or services? EU should maybe focus on like not having titled nobility and monarchy anymore and actual estate taxation
    - cbg0 2y ago
      Not sure what you're on about with the second statement, but for the first one: > In 2023, 92% of the surveyed individuals used internet and 70% bought or ordered products or services online in the 12 months preceding the survey. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=E-commerce_statistics_for_individuals https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
    - lm28469 2y ago
      > EU should maybe focus on like not having titled nobility and monarchy In Europe we have titles for show, in the US you don't have the titles but you still have the lords
      - whimsicalism 2y ago
        In Europe, you have ultrawealthy families that have been wealthy for centuries - from the actual nobility days. The US doesn’t really have that at all, although our estate tax could certainly be much higher but it is still higher than in practice in Europe.
        lm28469 2y ago
        > In Europe, you have ultrawealthy families that have been wealthy for centuries - from the actual nobility days. > The US doesn’t really have that at all Of course, my local pub is older than your country, generational wealth isn't a thing in the US, as is generational anything What you have is multi billionaires buying their way into politics and getting in the government while no one ever voted for them
- tommiegannert 2y ago
  This is the Italian data protection authority acting on a report from an Italian consumer group. The EU doesn't seem involved in this particular inquiry.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    sure because that is how the gdpr is implemented with national enforcement but they still have to submit draft decisions to the gdpr cooperation mechanism and get consensus and the EDPB gets final say. it is very much an EU/EEA process
    - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
      Even better then. I’m glad they did that.
Woshiwuja 2y ago
[dead]
wayoverthecloud 2y ago
Considering EU is so far behind on AI and tech as a whole, I hope they see this an opportunity to develop something of their own with better data privacy or whatever suits their boat(I don't know how though). I am really rooting for EU and their economy to bounce back. The world desperately needs a balance from all sides.
- grazing_fields 2y ago
  [dead]
- spiderfarmer 2y ago
  If anything, this revealed they aren’t actually that much behind. It’s just that the US’ lead is completely inflated and that the business models they dreamt of were finicky at best.
mftrhu 2y ago
To head off people's facile comments, I will just quote the first two paragraphs of the article, and then ask what part of it seems objectionable. > Italy's data protection authority is asking Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek for formal responses on how it handles Italians' data when they use its AI chatbot app. > The authority known as the Garante on Tuesday said it sent DeepSeek requests to disclose what personal data it collects, where it comes from, how it’s used, what legal basis it has to process that data under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and whether that data is stored on servers in China.
- cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  Unfortunately, while more accurate, a headline like “data protection arm of Italian gov sends polite disclosure requests to DeepSeek, as per their purview” isn’t very dramatic :)

40 points by thm 2y ago

whimsicalism 2y ago

EU doing what it knows best

andy_ppp 2y ago
GDPR is quite a sensible set of rules to be honest, if you want to understand the basics most of it comes down to 1) have a person you can contact in an organisation about your data 2) store people’s personal information as securely as if it’s credit card data 3) you have to be clear about what you’re doing with data from people in the EU and not store said data on servers outside the EU. All seems reasonable to me!
- immibis 2y ago
  US websites have been quite successful in fearmongering about it - either "oh no, the EU forced us to put this mess of annoying popups on our page" or "oh no, the EU forced us to block our own website from it"
  - zbshqoa 2y ago
    While I'm not necessarily against GDPR and regulations, is undeniable that the regulatory landscape in Europe has been preventing innovation. In fact it's tech market is predominantly dominated by US tech companies (and probably soon Chinese ones as well)
    - frabert 2y ago
      I'll try and spin it a different way -- What if the US and China had been unfairly taking advantage of their lax rules to bring innovation to the damage of their (and other countries') citizens, much like China has been unfairly exploiting its own lower standards of living and personal freedom to gain advantage in terms of manufacturing power against the US and Europe?
      - EGreg 2y ago
        Unfairly? That’s sort of a weird way of putting it! Look at these immigrants to USA “unfairly” exploiting their own relative poverty and lower standards of living and entertainment to outcompete regular Americans! The tiger moms also “unfairly” use their higher standards of achievement for their kids to send them to get piano lessons and KUMON centers instead of hanging out with their friends in the park. It’s so unfair! We have to restrict their opportunities. Maybe have quotas at the universities… It sounds a bit like that but on an international scale. I mean, one could argue it is far more unfair that they are behind in standards of living in the first place, what with all the Western imperialism and opium wars and British Raj. In India it is more unfair that Britain helped the East India company and engineered famines in the 1700s through 1940s through requisitioning grain, than the “unfairness” of Indian H1B visa workers “taking our jobs” now in a boomerang. ====== The only sense of “fairness” that makes any coherent sense here is that advanced countries should all cooperate to have minimum standards of living and human rights for everyone in them. Well, if we are going to cooperate on that, we may as well cooperate on non-proliferation of dangerous AI, as we successfully did with nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and CFCs. But the upsides of AI are “too sweet” (to quote nuclear researchers) to actually do cooperation, so we do competition instead. What is “unfair” about competition by exploiting lower standards of living or different culture, if you rule out cooperation?
        frabert 2y ago
        I was talking "fairness" from the point of view of the EU in this case, and it is the exact sense that you are delineating in your addendum at the end of the comment. It is "unfair" that a country gets to run circles around me because it completely ignores things that I consider important rights that my citizens fought for -- sane working hours, right to have my data kept to myself, right to express discontent against the government
        nickpp 2y ago
        > sane working hours So it's "unfair" when others work harder than us?! > right to express discontent against the government Last time I checked, the USA had "freer" speech than the EU.
    - cbg0 2y ago
      While companies will always follow the path of least resistance and prefer as little regulation as possible to make money without a lot of headaches, most people will prefer their privacy be respected and their data not sold-off without their approval or used in undocumented ways, even if it leads to less innovation in the corporate landscape.
    - tmnvdb 2y ago
      Regulation is only a small part of the story. Keep in mind that GDPR was implemented in 2018, long after Europe lost the tech battle. The lack of a unified (financial) service sector and hence a very weak and fragmented private capital market (-> VC ecosystem) is a bigger problem. Most funding is from risk-averse banks and slow-moving governments. Many EU based startups move to silicon valley for access to financing.
      - nickpp 2y ago
        There are other regulations making entrepreneurship quasi-impossible in the EU, not just GDPR. For example employment laws are thought for big, ossified companies, not lean and agile startups.
        tmnvdb 2y ago
        That is partly true, though not equally so in every country (Denmark is a positive example - as usual). Note that this kind of regulation is done on the national level and isn't strictly related to EU membership. On the other hand, salaries in the EU are significantly lower and it is a lot easier to find engineers. Even as a person who dislikes the overregulation it is not totally clear to me that the net status of the labour market is what makes entrepeneurship as impossible as you claim, despite the obvious negative effect of overregulation. If that was the main problem I would expect a "Silicon Valley" of Europe to form in Denmark or one of the other smaller states that have relatively flexible labour markets, but we are not really seeing that, as they are still hampered by a lack of funding. Instead we see that the biggest startup hubs are in Berlin and Paris, probably more related to network effects and national (financial) market size then to particularly attractive regulation, for which those places are not known.
    - tokai 2y ago
      A bit like a helmet prevents the pavement innovating your skull.
      - nickpp 2y ago
        There are countries that decided against compulsory helmet laws for bikers on the basis that biking health benefits outweigh the risks. When you raise barriers to an activity, even if for a good cause, you may end up losing more than you gain.
        tokai 2y ago
        The analogy was about motorcycle helmets, so no.
      - tmnvdb 2y ago
        The country with by far the highest number of people riding a bike (The Netherlands) does not have any helmet rules.
        sandermvanvliet 2y ago
        But the number of incidents with head injuries is increasing because more (elderly) people are riding e-bikes for longer than they would have a normal bike. As reaction times slow with age this is not a great combo with a faster bike which is a cause to more incidents. There is a big push currently for getting helmet rules adopted similar to how Denmark did this
    - immibis 2y ago
      What do you consider innovation? Was a certain regulation the reason DeepSeek-R1 didn't happen in Europe?
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  4. have a system for tracking every single dataset you have lying around including ones that might just be for experiments and in a different format and purge people who have requested to be forgotten or be fined 10s of thousands of dollars 5. frequent new legal interpretations that become the basis of enforcement and then you have to rearchitect the whole way you were handling data always good to impose onerous rules on R&D when you are critically losing the R&D and capital race
  - michaeljx 2y ago
    4. If it is personal data, you have to know where they came from, where they are stored and why. If you don't want to do that, then invest the minimal effort it takes to anonymize them during ingestion and then you can do whatever you want with them. 5. Now that is just false, or you have some really bad architects, if you are so sensitive to new legal interpretation (which there haven't been any significant ones)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
      Why does everything needs to be pro EU or anti EU. Yes, consumer privacy is more protected in EU. And yes it has directly caused EU R&D budget to become significantly smaller. And yes it has led to ad revenue decrease and created more problem for small companies who can't use non targeted ad. If you are arguing against any of these, for which there are lot of data I think you are not up for discussion.
      - mftrhu 2y ago
        Where is the GP taking a pro-EU or anti-EU stance? Where are they arguing against "ad revenue decrease" which "created more problem for small companies", or the impact of GDPR on the EU R&D budget?
      - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
oulipo 2y ago
Protecting their citizens
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  they’ll only be truly safe when their gdp per capita is a full half of the US
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    No worries until then we will have our great wall of Europe, as US grows to distaste any remaining allies.
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      No distaste for Europe, I just feel mildly sorry for what you are inflicting on yourself. The US has and will come to your defense, but we can’t defend you all from self-inflicted wealth-destroying policies.
      - bbzealot 2y ago
        > The US has and will come to your defense While threatening tariffs and a hostile takeover of Greenland?
        whimsicalism 2y ago
        1. Yes, we are quite literally defending you while doing those things right now. 2. Trump has bad policies yes, although I hadn’t heard anything about an actual military takeover of Greenland. 3. It’s not as if EU doesn’t have tariffs on the Us already, for instance you all are very protective of the auto industry as well as your domestic farmers, just to name a few. I think tariffs are bad policy on both sides of the atlantic
cbg0 2y ago
Enforcing data privacy laws? Sounds good to most citizens, 99% of which are not the entrepreneurs having to deal with the regulations.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  what percentage of EU citizens don’t use goods or services? EU should maybe focus on like not having titled nobility and monarchy anymore and actual estate taxation
  - cbg0 2y ago
    Not sure what you're on about with the second statement, but for the first one: > In 2023, 92% of the surveyed individuals used internet and 70% bought or ordered products or services online in the 12 months preceding the survey. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=E-commerce_statistics_for_individuals https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
  - lm28469 2y ago
    > EU should maybe focus on like not having titled nobility and monarchy In Europe we have titles for show, in the US you don't have the titles but you still have the lords
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      In Europe, you have ultrawealthy families that have been wealthy for centuries - from the actual nobility days. The US doesn’t really have that at all, although our estate tax could certainly be much higher but it is still higher than in practice in Europe.
      - lm28469 2y ago
        > In Europe, you have ultrawealthy families that have been wealthy for centuries - from the actual nobility days. > The US doesn’t really have that at all Of course, my local pub is older than your country, generational wealth isn't a thing in the US, as is generational anything What you have is multi billionaires buying their way into politics and getting in the government while no one ever voted for them
tommiegannert 2y ago
This is the Italian data protection authority acting on a report from an Italian consumer group. The EU doesn't seem involved in this particular inquiry.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  sure because that is how the gdpr is implemented with national enforcement but they still have to submit draft decisions to the gdpr cooperation mechanism and get consensus and the EDPB gets final say. it is very much an EU/EEA process
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    Even better then. I’m glad they did that.

Woshiwuja 2y ago

[dead]

wayoverthecloud 2y ago

Considering EU is so far behind on AI and tech as a whole, I hope they see this an opportunity to develop something of their own with better data privacy or whatever suits their boat(I don't know how though). I am really rooting for EU and their economy to bounce back. The world desperately needs a balance from all sides.

grazing_fields 2y ago
[dead]
spiderfarmer 2y ago
If anything, this revealed they aren’t actually that much behind. It’s just that the US’ lead is completely inflated and that the business models they dreamt of were finicky at best.

mftrhu 2y ago

To head off people's facile comments, I will just quote the first two paragraphs of the article, and then ask what part of it seems objectionable. > Italy's data protection authority is asking Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek for formal responses on how it handles Italians' data when they use its AI chatbot app. > The authority known as the Garante on Tuesday said it sent DeepSeek requests to disclose what personal data it collects, where it comes from, how it’s used, what legal basis it has to process that data under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and whether that data is stored on servers in China.

cadamsdotcom 2y ago
Unfortunately, while more accurate, a headline like “data protection arm of Italian gov sends polite disclosure requests to DeepSeek, as per their purview” isn’t very dramatic :)