the company states that it may share user information to "comply with applicable law, legal process, or government requests.
Literally every company’s privacy policy here in the US basically just says that too.
Not only does DeepSeek collect “text or audio input, prompt, uploaded files, feedback, chat history, or other content that [the user] provide[s] to our model and Services,” but it also collects information from your device, including “device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language.”
Breaking news, company with chatbot you send messages to uses and stores the messages you send, and also does what practically every other app does for demographic statistics gathering and optimizations.
Companies with AI models like Google, Meta, and OpenAI collect similar troves of information, but their privacy policies do not mention collecting keystrokes. There’s also the added issue that DeepSeek sends your user data straight to Chinese servers.
They didn’t use the word keystrokes, therefore they don’t collect them? Of course they collect keystrokes, how else would you type anything into these apps?
In DeepSeek’s privacy policy, there’s no mention of the security of its servers. There’s nothing about whether data is encrypted, either stored or in transmission, and zero information about safeguards to prevent unauthorized access.
This is the only thing that seems disturbing to me, compared to what we’d like to expect based on the context of what DeepSeek is. Of course, this was proven recently in practice to be terrible policy, so I assume they might shore up their defenses a bit.
All the articles that talk about this as if it’s some big revelation just boil down to “company does exactly what every other big tech company does in America, except in China”
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
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).
Literally every company’s privacy policy here in the US basically just says that too.
Breaking news, company with chatbot you send messages to uses and stores the messages you send, and also does what practically every other app does for demographic statistics gathering and optimizations.
They didn’t use the word keystrokes, therefore they don’t collect them? Of course they collect keystrokes, how else would you type anything into these apps?
This is the only thing that seems disturbing to me, compared to what we’d like to expect based on the context of what DeepSeek is. Of course, this was proven recently in practice to be terrible policy, so I assume they might shore up their defenses a bit.
All the articles that talk about this as if it’s some big revelation just boil down to “company does exactly what every other big tech company does in America, except in China”
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).