By Bob Bevilacqua Founder / CEO of Acquasition Digital Marketing Agency
If you’ve been tuned out for a bit—maybe catching some sun or just taking a break from the news cycle—you might have missed the latest shake-up in the AI world. Let me bring you up to speed. The DeepSeek Dilemma.
A new player, DeepSeek, has stormed onto the scene, and it’s not just making waves—it’s causing a tsunami. , This Chinese startup dropped an AI chatbot that skyrocketed to the top of the app store charts in the U.S. within a week. Sounds like a dream launch, right? Well, not for everyone. The sudden rise rattled investors, hitting tech giants like Nvidia and Oracle where it hurts—their stock prices.
But the real concern here isn’t just market shifts; it’s the data. Where is it coming from? Who owns it? And, most importantly, how secure is it?
Not Exactly Open-Source—And That’s a Problem
DeepSeek has been marketed as an open-source project, but let’s be real—that’s a bit of a stretch. In reality, it’s what’s known as an open-weight model—meaning certain outputs and aspects of the system are available to the public, but the real meat and potatoes, like the training data and underlying code, are kept under wraps. And that’s where the red flags start waving.
Why does this matter? Because transparency is everything in AI. Without it, we don’t know if the data fueling this model is ethically sourced, legally obtained, or even safe to interact with.
Did DeepSeek Train on Stolen Data?
Now, here’s where things get spicy. OpenAI is accusing DeepSeek of using ChatGPT’s model to train its AI chatbot. That’s right—DeepSeek might have trained its AI on data that wasn’t theirs to begin with. The irony? OpenAI has faced similar accusations in the past for scraping data from the internet without clear permissions.
It’s like watching a heist movie where the thief gets robbed, then turns around and calls the cops.
Governments Are Taking Notice
When a company rockets to success this fast, regulators tend to perk up—and that’s exactly what’s happening. Italy’s privacy watchdog, the GPDP, has stepped in, demanding answers. They’ve given DeepSeek 20 days to explain:
✅ What personal data they’re collecting
✅ Where the data is coming from
✅ Why they’re gathering it in the first place
✅ Whether the data is being stored on servers in China
The pressure is already taking effect—as of January 29, 2025, DeepSeek has vanished from Apple and Google’s app stores in Italy. That’s a bold move, and one that suggests regulators aren’t playing around.
A Major Security Nightmare
And just when you think the plot couldn’t get any thicker—cybersecurity researchers at Wiz uncovered an exposed DeepSeek database. And we’re not talking about a minor security slip-up. This thing was wide open, containing:
🔴 Chat histories
🔴 Backend operational data
🔴 API secrets
🔴 Log files
🔴 Plaintext passwords (yes, you read that right)
It wasn’t just readable—it was fully accessible, meaning anyone who stumbled across it could extract sensitive data, manipulate permissions, and even escalate privileges within DeepSeek’s system.
That’s not a mistake—that’s a disaster.
The Bigger Picture: AI Moves Fast, Security Lags Behind
Look, I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably have to say it a hundred times more: The race for AI dominance is moving at breakneck speed, and security is always an afterthought.
Companies are so focused on rolling out the next big thing that they’re cutting corners on privacy and security—leaving users exposed in ways we’ve never seen before. And until governments enforce real accountability, this cycle will keep repeating.
So, here’s my advice: Be mindful of what you’re feeding these AI tools. Every chat, every interaction—there’s no telling where that data might end up. The convenience is tempting, but the risks? They’re real.
Stay smart, stay protected, and remember—just because an app is trending doesn’t mean it’s safe.
