If you do not consent to AI training, Samsung will destroy your health data

The Samsung Health The app has received some major additions so far this year. Unfortunately, if you disagree with a controversial action, the company holds your health information hostage.

Some Samsung Health users (h/t: How – Geek) now sees a notice and link titled “Consent to Use Health Data for AI Training and Modeling”. yes, Samsung It uses your health data to train AI. But that’s not the worst part. Disabling this switch results in a message warning users that they will not be able to sync their health data with their Samsung account and that this data will be deleted unless required by law. See screenshots of the output below.

A Samsung Health page also describes exactly what health data is obtained for AI training and modeling:

• Health and wellness data: information about body measurements, nutrition, step count and activity and sleep
• Medication information: information about medications, including prescriptions and dosages
• Health records: medical and clinical information such as diagnoses, prognoses, test results, past records and treatments
• Period tracking data: data related to menstrual cycles, including physical conditions and physiological indicators (eg heart rate).

“The health data you allow us to collect and process will be used for AI training and modeling, including human research to improve Samsung Health, including algorithms to analyze health conditions and our AI features,” another part of the page reads.

If confirmed, it would be a deeply worrying move by the Galaxy maker. Health information like this is extremely sensitive, and there is no word that this information is anonymized in the first place.

But even though Samsung has taken great steps to anonymize and protect this data, it still seems like a consumer-hostile move. A basic function like syncing health data feels very difficult to do while training Samsung’s AI. If you are primarily using generative AI features, we can somewhat understand the AI ​​training/processing requirement. However, this can be especially frustrating for Samsung Health users who don’t use AI features and just want a seamless health package that works across devices.

In any case, we’ve reached out to Samsung to confirm this switch and the associated behavior. We also asked the company how it handles this data and its thoughts on how to effectively hold users’ health information hostage. We will update the article as soon as Samsung gets back to us.