Vivold Consulting

Deepseek faces ban in Germany as privacy watchdog reports the app to Google and Apple as "illegal content"

Key Insights

Germany's data protection authorities have requested Apple and Google to block DeepSeek from their app stores due to GDPR violations.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

Germany’s data protection authorities have called on Apple and Google to block the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek from their app stores, citing violations of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). According to Berlin's Data Protection Commissioner Meike Kamp, the app unlawfully transfers user data to China and lacks adequate safeguards as required by Article 46(1) of the GDPR. The company behind the app, Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd, failed to address official demands made in May 2025 to cease the illegal data transfer or meet legal standards. Similar concerns led Italy to ban DeepSeek in January 2025, and several other EU countries—including France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Portugal—have ongoing investigations into the app’s data practices. Despite updating its privacy policy in July 2025 to mitigate concerns such as user profiling, unresolved issues like data retention transparency persist. With over 97 million users globally, DeepSeek may soon be inaccessible in Germany through official channels, although VPN use could provide circumvention options. However, experts warn that this method has limitations and should be approached with caution due to continued privacy risks.

Related Articles

An AWS knowledge-graph deployment turned 6-month research cycles into 3 weeks - and the blueprint transfers far beyond pharma

An AWS GraphRAG deployment in pharmaceutical research cut R&D cycles by 87% - initial discovery that took six months now closes in three weeks - by fusing siloed internal databases and public literature into one queryable knowledge graph on Amazon Neptune Analytics and Bedrock (running Claude). Every answer comes with verifiable citations and a mapped reasoning path, which is exactly what regulated industries need for compliance. The architecture is modular and, crucially, transferable: any enterprise drowning in fragmented legacy data can copy this pattern.

SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI listings will out-value every US VC-backed exit since 2000 - reshaping vendor economics for everyone

The new NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Monitor dropped a stunning claim: the pending OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, together with SpaceX's listing, will generate more value than every US VC-backed exit since 2000 combined. SpaceX is already public at $1.77 trillion, and with both AI labs pushing toward trillion-dollar debuts, the trio should land north of $4 trillion - against roughly $70 billion in total US IPO proceeds last year. For anyone buying AI services, the labs' shift to public-market scrutiny will reshape pricing, transparency, and vendor stability.

A 14-person open-source team just became the default way 8.9M developers run local AI - and a lever for slashing inference bills

Ollama, the open-source tool that lets developers run open-weight AI models on their own machines in minutes, raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Ventures ($88M total), revealing it now serves 8.9 million developers monthly and sits inside 85% of the Fortune 500 - with just 14 employees. Founders Jeff Morgan and Michael Chiang previously built Docker Desktop, and they're repeating the play: abstract away the hardware pain, then monetise a cloud tier priced on GPU time rather than tokens. The backdrop is the industry's loudest cost debate: every company with heavy inference bills is under existential pressure to shift routine workloads to open models.