Put the pitchforks away — Samsung has something to say. Opting out of Samsung Health’s new AI training policy won’t delete your health data after all. Earlier this week, we reported the opposite, with many users reporting a pretty damning pop-up claiming that their health data would be gone if they didn’t play ball.
People were, rightfully, upset. While Samsung can impose such requirements for its app, holding your data hostage isn’t the smartest way to do so. However, Samsung has now clarified its position in a new pop-up in the app. In short, withdrawing your consent to train Samsung’s AI won’t delete your health data after all.
Artificial foolishness
This wasn’t a misunderstanding on the user’s part. The initial in-app pop-up clearly stated that withdrawing consent for AI training would mean “You will not be able to sync health data with your Samsung account and your health data will be deleted unless retained pursuant to applicable law.” Samsung understands this, as noted in its updated statement: it is “currently improving the notice text…”
When a user toggles ‘Consent to the use of health data for AI training and modelling’ inside the app, they’ll retain all their usual health data. Instead, Samsung will root out the “separately collected” data used to train the AI.
That’s about as good as you could hope for. SamMobile put Samsung’s words to the test and withdrew its consent. It did, in fact, not delete any data and still allowed the account to sync to the cloud. Grab a tinfoil hat and consider the possibility that Samsung knew exactly what it was doing, only correcting course when it saw user reactions.
