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Enforcement or court caseMediaFrontierSouth Korea ChinaReported

Korea’s privacy regulator finds DeepSeek sent prompts to ByteDance’s Volcano Engine

See how this story connects

Source: South China Morning PostAlso reported by AFP via Hespress

On 24 April 2025 South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission said DeepSeek had sent device, network and app data and users’ AI prompts to servers of Volcano Engine, a Beijing cloud platform owned by ByteDance, without user consent. The commission said that at launch DeepSeek had also passed personal data to companies in China and the United States without disclosing it in its privacy policy. New downloads stayed suspended pending the review.

Why it matters

The finding gave Korean users and other regulators a documented case of a Chinese chatbot moving prompt data abroad without consent.

When
24 Apr 2025
ID
WTA-N-2025-0100
Who
Personal Information Protection Commission (South Korea), DeepSeek, ByteDance
Authority
Personal Information Protection Commission (South Korea)
Target
DeepSeek
Action
finding: data sent without consent
Status
closed · Enforcement ledger

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from South China Morning Post and the reporting credited above. We could not open the primary document, so it is marked Reported. Checked against the source on 9 Oct 2026.

Read the original at South China Morning Post

Source copy: download the page text as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: What happened nextDeepSeek and MiniMax register under China’s new AI export rules, state media says

Cite this story

WTA-N-2025-0100: “Korea’s privacy regulator finds DeepSeek sent prompts to ByteDance’s Volcano Engine.” wheresthe.ai, 24 Apr 2025. https://wheresthe.ai/d/kr-pipc-deepseek-data-transfer-finding-2025-04/ (source: South China Morning Post).

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