Samsung will kill your health data if you don’t consent to AI training

The Samsung Health app has received some major additions so far this year. Unfortunately, it looks like the company is holding your health data hostage if you don’t agree to a controversial move.

Some Samsung Health users (h/t: How-To Geek) are now seeing a notice and toggle titled “Consent to the Use of Health Data for AI Training and Modelling.” Yes, Samsung is using your health data to train AI. But that’s not the worst part. Disabling this toggle results in a message warning users that they won’t be able to sync health data to their Samsung account and that this data will be deleted unless required by law. Check out the outlet’s screenshots below.

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

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

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

If confirmed, this would be a deeply concerning move by the Galaxy maker. Health data like this is extremely sensitive, and there’s no word if this data is being anonymized in the first place.

But even if Samsung is taking major steps to anonymize and safeguard this data, it still seems like a consumer-hostile move. Making a basic feature like health data synchronization contingent on training Samsung’s AI feels very icky. We can somewhat understand the AI training/processing requirement if you’re using generative AI features in the first place. However, this might be particularly frustrating for Samsung Health users who don’t use AI features and just want a no-frills health suite that works across devices.

In any event, we’ve contacted Samsung to confirm this toggle and its associated behavior. We’ve also asked the company how it’s handling this data and for its views on effectively holding users’ health data hostage. We’ll update the article as soon as Samsung gets back to us.