A quote from the article:

DeepSeek is open source, meaning you can modify code(new window) on your own app to create an independent — and more secure — version. This has led some to hope that a more privacy-friendly version of DeepSeek could be developed.

This is just plain wrong. The model doesn’t contain the privacy unfriendly logic and can be used freely and unmodified. In fact, there are plenty of other platforms available right now where you can use it that are not Chinese.

This article makes fair points, if you ignore the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about. You need to fix the errors in your head while reading it for it to make sense. If you don’t have the knowledge to do that, the whole article is a bit misleading.

There are plenty of other online platforms where you can use the unmodified model without siphoning your data to China. The model itself is just an offline blob and doesn’t need to be modified to make a “more secure” and “privacy friendly” version like the article says it does, because the model is not tasked with collecting and sharing your data. The author doesn’t seem to be aware of that.