South Korea has suspended downloads of DeepSeek's artificial intelligence-powered chatbot pending a review of the Chinese start-up's privacy standards. South Korea's privacy watchdog said on Monday that DeepSeek's R1 chatbot was removed from the local versions of Apple's App Store and Google Play after the Hangzhou-based firm acknowledged that it had failed to comply with personal data protection rules. The Personal Information Protection Commission said in a statement that DeepSeek accepted its proposal to suspend downloads of the app. The chatbot is still available for those who have already downloaded the app. "To prevent further concerns from spreading, the commission recommended that DeepSeek temporarily suspend its service while making the necessary improvements," the commission said, adding that bringing the app in line with local regulations would "inevitably take a significant amount of time".

Australia's privacy watchdog has launched an inquiry into how TikTok harvests personal data and whether it is being done with consent. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) will examine whether the social media platform has breached the online privacy of Australians through the use of marketing pixels, which track people's online habits. This can include where they shop, how long they stay on websites and personal information, such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers. Liberal senator James Paterson, who has been campaigning against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, has alleged the social media platform is using pixels to collect information of non-TikTok users. "This conduct would be unacceptable from any company but is particularly alarming given TikTok is beholden to the Chinese Communist party and is required under China's intelligence laws to share information with Chinese government intelligence agencies," Paterson said.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT are complicating governments' efforts to agree laws governing the use of the technology. The government is consulting Australia's main science advisory body and considering next steps, a spokesperson for the industry and science minister said in April. The Financial Conduct Authority, one of several state regulators that has been tasked with drawing up new guidelines covering AI, is consulting with the Alan Turing Institute and other legal and academic institutions to improve its understanding of the technology, a spokesperson told Reuters.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT are complicating governments' efforts to agree to laws governing the use of the technology. The government is consulting Australia's main science advisory body and is considering the next steps, a spokesperson for the industry and science minister said in April. The Financial Conduct Authority, one of several state regulators tasked with drawing up new guidelines covering AI, is consulting with the Alan Turing Institute and other legal and academic institutions to improve its understanding of the technology, a spokesperson said. Britain's competition regulator said on May 4 it would start examining the effect of AI on consumers, businesses and the economy, and whether new controls were needed. Britain said in March it planned to split responsibility for governing AI between its regulators for human rights, health and safety, and competition, rather than creating a new body. China's cyberspace regulator in April unveiled draft measures to manage generative AI services, saying it wanted firms to submit security assessments to authorities before they launch offerings to the public.

More and more privacy watchdogs around the world are standing up to Clearview AI, a U.S. company that has collected billions of photos from the internet without people's permission. The company, which uses those photos for its facial recognition software, was fined £7.5 million ($9.4 million) by a U.K. regulator on May 26. The U.K. Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the firm, Clearview AI, had broken data protection law. The company denies breaking the law. But the case reveals how nations have struggled to regulate artificial intelligence across borders. Facial recognition tools require huge quantities of data.

Three provincial privacy watchdogs have ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop collecting, using and disclosing images of people without consent. The privacy authorities of British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec are also requiring the U.S. firm to delete images and biometric data collected without permission from individuals. The binding orders made public Tuesday follow a joint investigation by the three provincial authorities with the office of federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien. The watchdogs found in February that Clearview AI's facial recognition technology resulted in mass surveillance of Canadians and violated federal and provincial laws governing personal information. They said the New York-based company's scraping of billions of images of people from across the internet to help police forces, financial institutions and other clients identify people was a clear breach of Canadians' privacy rights.

You don't want your face to appear in the database of Clearview AI? The company's CEO doesn't seem to care. "All the information we collect is collected legally and it is all publicly available information," Hoan Ton-That said Monday during DW's Global Media Forum (GMF), addressing criticism that the firm's controversial technology infringes on the privacy of hundreds of millions. Privacy activists recently lodged data protection complaints against Clearview AI in five European countries. They argue that the software -- a search engine for faces combing through billions of photos -- violates the UK's and the EU's strict privacy rules.

A German privacy watchdog has ordered Google to cease manual reviews of audio snippets generated by its voice AI. This follows a leak last month of scores of audio snippets from the Google Assistant service. A contractor working as a Dutch language reviewer handed more than 1,000 recordings to the Belgian news site VRT which was then able to identify some of the people in the clips. It reported being able to hear people's addresses, discussion of medical conditions, and recordings of a woman in distress. The Hamburg data protection authority told Google of its intention to use Article 66 powers of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to begin an "urgency procedure" under Article 66 of GDPR last month.

France's data privacy watchdog may fine WhatsApp if it does not comply with an order to bring its sharing of user data with parent company Facebook into line with French privacy law. CNIL, the French data protection authority, has told WhatsApp to comply with the order within one month, and pay particular attention to obtaining users' consent. If WhatsApp doesn't comply, it could sanction the company, CNIL said. France's data privacy watchdog may fine WhatsApp if it does not comply with an order to bring its sharing of user data with parent company Facebook into line with French privacy law (stock image) WhatsApp said it would begin sharing some user data with the Facebook in 2016, drawing warnings from European privacy watchdogs about getting the appropriate consent. In October, European Union privacy regulators criticised WhatsApp for not resolving their concerns over the messaging service's sharing of user data with Facebook a year after they first issued a warning.

UK privacy watchdog says Facebook agrees to suspend using WhatsApp users' data BRUSSELS Britain's privacy watchdog said on Monday that Facebook has agreed to suspend using data from UK users of its WhatsApp messaging app for advertisements or product-improvement purposes after the watchdog said consumers weren't properly protected.