Greece’s Hellenic Data Protection Authority (HDPA) has launched a formal investigation into the Chinese AI platform DeepSeek following a request by Homo Digitalis, a Greek Non-Governmental Civil Non-Profit Organization that focuses on the protection and promotion of human rights in the digital age.
Homo Digitalis submitted its request late last year, urging the HDPA to exercise its investigative powers regarding the use of the popular Chinese AI platform in Greece.
In its press release, Homo Digitalis attributed DeepSeek’s rise in popularity to increased media exposure and called on the HDPA to “immediately impose restrictions on the processing of personal data of users within the Greek territory by the Deepseek platform, temporarily prohibiting its availability and use in the Greek market.”
“The necessary safeguards required by law do not appear to be in place,” said Eleftherios Chelioudakis, Co-founder & Executive Director of Homo Digitalis, in a separate interview with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini. “DeepSeek’s privacy policy lacks detail; it does not specify which data is collected or to whom it is transferred.”
Following the request by Homo Digitalis, the HDPA officially confirmed that it had “initiated an ex officio investigation into the legality, under the General Data Protection Regulation, of the DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence application.”
As DeepSeek operates within the European Union, it is subject to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which governs how personal data of individuals in the EU is collected, processed, and stored.
