Wrong Audience
Look, nobody dumb enough to actually install this on their phone gave a single damn about privacy or security in the first place.
But before we get too smug, carelessness aside (plaintext?), just consider Facebook. If you've got that on your phone, well, see the first sentence again. That's actively worse because they have and are harvesting far more info about you than Deepseek. Facebook even has a virtual profile of you with your credit card transactions, bank transactions, health records, etc. (all bought from third party brokers or other apps) even if you're not using their platforms. They grab data from millions of other apps. And if you're a random Joe Schmoe outside Mainland China, Facebook uses that data about you far more maliciously than the Chinese Communist Party ever could. They sell your data en masse to anyone (though they will deny it, they've been caught doing it many times and they purposely design their stuff so data easily falls between the cracks), they sell you for maliciously targeted ads and scams, and the scope and breadth of their data means they know far more about you than you think they possibly could.
So... yes, I would never install this, but billions of people are mindlessly using worse every day.