A notice displayed to customers on Apple’s App Store said the app developed by Chinese startup DeepSeek was “currently not available in the country or area you are in”, whereas a message on the Google app platform said the download “was not supported” in Italy.
The AI chatbot’s disappearance from Italian digital stores came a day after Italy's Data Protection Agency (GPDP) raised questions about its use of personal data.
"The authority, considering the potential high risk for the data of millions of people in Italy, has asked [...] what personal data is collected, from which sources [and] for which purposes," the GPDP said in a statement on Tuesday.
The watchdog asked "what is the legal basis of the processing [of the data], and whether it is stored on servers located in China".
The GPDP also requested clarification on what kind of information was used to train DeepSeek's AI system and how users of the service are informed about the processing of their data.
The GPDP filed its concerns with Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and Beijing DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, giving them 20 days to respond.
Based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is sometimes referred to as ‘China's Silicon Valley’, DeepSeek sparked panic on Wall Street earlier this week after news emerged that its new chatbot had been developed at a fraction of the cost of its competitors.
The Italian watchdog in December fined OpenAI 15 million euros over the use of personal data by its popular ChatGPT chatbot, but the US tech firm said it would appeal.
The investigation began in March 2023 when the GPDP temporarily blocked ChatGPT in Italy over privacy concerns, becoming the first Western country to take such action.
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