**China Shocked to Learn Italians Prefer Their Data Stolen by Local Corporations**
In a shocking turn of events for international espionage, Italy has decided that if anyone is going to shamelessly harvest its citizens’ personal data, it better be a homegrown, Western-approved conglomerate—not some suspicious foreign power with unclear intentions, like China.
Chinese AI platform DeepSeek mysteriously vanished from the Apple and Google app stores in Italy this week, leaving users dumbfounded as they suddenly had to find different ways to have their data exploited. “I was just getting used to an AI reading all my personal conversations,” lamented Marco Bertolini, a disappointed DeepSeek user. “Now I have to go back to relying on Meta and Amazon for that.”
Italian and Irish regulators have demanded answers from DeepSeek regarding the “potential misuse” of their citizens’ data by the Chinese government, expressing deep concern that China could use the information for, well, something sinister. “We have no idea what they plan to do with it, and that’s the problem,” said a worried Italian official. “If this were good old-fashioned Western surveillance capitalism, we’d at least know they were selling it for obscene profits.”
Amid these concerns, DeepSeek suddenly disappeared from app stores, with Apple and Google swiftly denying users access because, let’s be honest, they want to be the only ones profiting off people’s digital lives. “We’re committed to protecting user data,” said an unnamed Google spokesperson, with a completely straight face. “Unless, of course, we’re selling it to advertisers—then it’s just good business.”
Critics of the Western crackdown on Chinese tech call it an unfair double standard, given that several other AI-powered platforms are currently collecting more data than the NSA on a holiday shopping spree. “It would be one thing if we applied these same rules to everyone, but let’s face it, this is just about geopolitical paranoia,” admitted a tech analyst. “If China learned to sell data theft as a ‘valuable user experience,’ they’d probably get away with it too.”
Meanwhile, European officials continue to scrutinize DeepSeek, determined to uncover what specific kind of privacy invasion it offers—so they can either block it or steal the business model for themselves.
