China’s Deep Seek Watches You, China’s AI Toys Watch Your Children

​It seems that China is excelling of late in the artificial intelligence arena, and we’ll cover two such instances today.
 
The first is the launch of the game-changing large language model DeepSeek, which turned its Western competitors on their ears. Faster, less expensive, and more customizable than the rest, it is also brazenly forthright about its lack of privacy protections. As Zak Doffman of Forbes points out in his cybersecurity analysis of DeepSeek, buried deep within the product’s Privacy Policy are declarations like this: “The personal information we collect from you may be stored on a server located outside of the country where you live. We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China.”
 
As for what they collect, specifically, Doffman says they are unambiguous: everything. See for yourself in detail.
 
And to think we worried about TikTok. “Just ask what a powerful AI engine in state hands could do with all that personally identifiable information,” Doffman muses. “This is strategic in a way TikTok never was.”
 
The second instance of this “you can’t spell CHINA without an ‘A’ and an ‘I’” moment is an update on a phenomenon about which Kay Firth-Butterfield, CEO of Good Tech Advisory, recently reminded us: China is building the AI that powers your children’s toys.
 
From robotic pets to interactive storytelling dolls to remote-control vehicles, as a market segment, AI toys are on target to grow to $40 billion in the next seven years. Laurent Belsie of The Christian Science Monitor found himself casting a wary eye on the whole scene as Christmas approached last year. Some of the growth will be obvious – last year it was Poe the AI Story Bear – but Belsie reports that within two years many makers will have stealthily added AI capabilities to their existing toys.
 
What does all of this have to do with China? Upwards of 80 percent of the world’s toys and their components are currently manufactured there. So when AI comes for (er, to) your children’s toys, it’s likely to be of Chinese design as well. And all that data generated by interactive, conversational – even potentially camera-based – AI toys have to be stored somewhere, as experts like Firth-Butterfield and others remind us. Where, exactly, is increasingly coming into focus.
 
It’s one thing if adults are profligate with their own data (downloading DeepSeek so quickly that it became the top free app on iTunes within a week of its release, for example). It is another when it comes to privacy of children.

DONATE & HELP US PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS