Petteri Pyyny
13 Jul 2026 17:03
Korean giant Samsung has apparently put some of its users in front of a rather unpleasant choice.
According to information obtained by the How-to-Geek website, a new checkbox has appeared for some users of Samsung's health and wellness application, Samsung Health.
This view asks users to agree that Samsung may use the user's health data for training its AI model.
What makes the choice particularly problematic is that refusal is not really possible: if the option is not accepted, Samsung Health will stop synchronizing data with the user's Samsung account, meaning the collected data will simply be completely destroyed.
The company would likely use user data to develop smart, AI-based health applications, i.e., solutions somewhat similar to Garmin's subscription-based Connect+ or Google's new subscription-based Google Health Premium.
But the mandatory surrender of health data for AI use, without a real possibility to refuse the choice, sounds like it smells like it might violate several laws in the European Union - even if the data were completely anonymized. Elsewhere in the world, the practice is likely legal - albeit one that causes a lot of bad blood among users.