Samsung Health tells users: consent to AI training or lose your health data

Samsung has added a buried opt-in toggle to its Samsung Health app that ties cloud backup to consent for AI training. Users who decline the “Consent to the Use of Health Data for AI training and modelling” setting can no longer sync their data to a Samsung account, and any data already stored gets deleted unless a law requires Samsung to keep it. The consent covers four sensitive categories — sleep, medications, medical records, and menstrual cycle tracking — and Samsung acknowledges that some of this data may be reviewed by humans, potentially including employees and third-party contractors.

The move coincides with a heavy generative-AI overhaul of Samsung Health timed to the Galaxy Watch 9 and One UI 9 Watch launch. New features lean on continuous biometric analysis: Vitals compares overnight signals like heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and blood oxygen against a personal baseline to flag possible illness or fatigue, while a Heart Health Score, Cardio Load, and Fitness Index roll activity, sleep, stress, and VO2 max into single scores. Training these models is presumably the point of the new consent grab.

The significance is less about the features than the coercive framing: rather than offering AI training as a genuine opt-in, Samsung threatens deletion of a user’s own historical health record as the cost of refusal. That effectively converts backup — a service people expect — into leverage to extract rights over some of the most sensitive data a person holds, and it will likely draw scrutiny under regimes like GDPR that require freely given, unbundled consent.