DeepSeek app not available in Apple and Google app stores in Italy

The Chinese AI app DeepSeek, which gained significant attention this week and contributed to a drop in tech stock prices, was not accessible in Italy on Wednesday through either the Apple or Google app stores. Apple’s App Store showed a message to Italian users stating the app was “currently not available in the country or area you are in,” while Google’s platform indicated that the download “was not supported” in Italy.
Reuters:
‎

The cause of the outage was not immediately clear.
DeepSeek seemed to be still operational for Italian users who had previously downloaded the application, and was available for download and working on Wednesday in other European Union countries and in Britain.
Its disappearance came after Italy’s data protection authority said on Tuesday it was seeking answers from DeepSeek on its use of personal data in one of the first regulatory moves targeting the Chinese start-up.
The Italian regulator, known as the Garante, said it wanted to know what personal data is collected, from which sources, for what purposes, on what legal basis and whether it is stored in China. It gave DeepSeek and its affiliated companies 20 days to respond.

‎
MacDailyNews Take: The Italian regulator is smart.
All Chinese companies and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are one and the same, i.e., not to be trusted.
Ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square and Taiwan to find out how accurate and trustworthy it is.

We are currently about 1/4th of the way to being sustainable with Substack subscriptions.
Please tell your Apple-loving friends about MacDailyNews on Substack and, if you’re currently a free subscriber, please consider $5/mo. or $50/year to keep MacDailyNews going. Just hit the subscribe button. Thank you!

Read on Substack

‎
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
The post DeepSeek app not available in Apple and Google app stores in Italy appeared first on MacDailyNews.