Medications, menstrual cycle, and more: Samsung shares sensitive data with AI and employees

The Samsung Health app functions similarly to Apple Health or Google Health as a hub for health data. Among other devices, smartwatches like the Samsung Galaxy Watch8 ($237 on Amazon) sync data with Samsung Health, where it is then stored in the user’s Samsung account. This data can subsequently be synced with third-party apps such as Strava. However, it appears that Samsung will no longer be taking data privacy quite as seriously in the future.

As How To Geek has learned, some users of Samsung Health have already received a notification stating that their data will be used to train AI models in the future. According to Samsung, this also applies to highly sensitive data, including sleep and cycle tracking, heart rate, clinical diagnoses, prognoses, test results, treatments, and medication. Although this data could hardly be more sensitive, it may not be anonymized, as the message lacks any indication to that effect.

In addition to AI models, Samsung employees will also have access to this data to manually review the AI’s results. If users do not consent to this use of their health data, Samsung will just delete all health data from the app. Anyone who has used Samsung Health as a hub for health data up to this point will potentially lose data collected over years regarding workouts, illness histories, and sleep. Despite inquiries, Samsung has not yet commented on whether it will be possible in the future to use Samsung Health without completely sacrificing data privacy.