> The company plans to grab four categories: your sleep, your medications, your medical records, and your cycle tracking details
So you buy a device but you can't effectively use half of its features because you'd also have to agree to send them your medical records? Ok then if I refuse, will they refund 50% of the device price since now it's not usable any more?
And file a complaint... As that breaches a dozen or more EU laws. If a lot of people do it in all the countries, it becomes a national issue.
That is the only way you fix things, and yes, we have had multiple successes with companies taking the piss. Even Samsung can not escape as their have officies in the EU and sell products there.
For the folks outside the EU, ... Its a harder fight and you need to look up your local agencies.
Really quick that leads to not being able to buy anything though.
Sony has done a bunch of evil things (deleting paid media, hiding rootkits in music CDs). Apple abuses their monopoly to force using their web browser and extort a 30% cut of all purchases. Every car manufacturer is tracking every car they sell and selling that data. Retailers are tracking store visits using everything from face recognition to MAC addresses on cell phones.
Boycotting can only do so much. We need regulations to protect people and steep fines for violating them.
I had a ~2008 vintage Samsung phone with a fingerprint sensor that gave your blood oxygen level (SpO2). One day it told me something similar, I had to agree to send them data or I couldn’t use it. So I never used it again, but yeah they have been abusing their costumers a long time.
This is they same company whose tvs take pictures of what you are watching and send them back to Samsung.
Every TV might do this, not every single one does. Buy TVs which allow you to opt out (at least in one case it was several opt-ins, no opt out per SE).
I don't really want to ask for permission to be excused from this vile monitoring. I don't want it to be in there at all. But I'm not aware of any brand which doesn't do this.
At the moment usually just a nag popup on power on.
Annoying but not a huge deal. I imagine this will slowly get worse as more people learn to not connect it to WiFi.
Also of course all the smart tv features don’t work, and a lot more folks than I ever imagined actually use the built in controller (usually some form of Android or Roku) to watch Netflix and whatnot. And a lot of folks actually do watch the built in TV “channels” a lot of vendors ship with.
It seems very few people buy an additional device like an Apple TV or Nvidia Shield.
I heard on another forum that the latest Samsungs just don't progress through the setup wizard without internet. And someone noticed they retain WiFi passwords even after a factory reset.
You can still set up a temporary WiFi and just kill it after but it's getting pretty insane now.
Buying a device doesn't mean vendor-hosted services are included, unless explicitly stated. This is the kind of thing why they can get away with taking unsolicited actions on people's devices whenever they want. CUT THAT CORD!
> I really feel like "grab" is quite condescending
By all means, let's use a more appropriate term, like "abuse" or "misappropriate". It's not sufficiently condescending for a company that's trying to train AI on people's private health data.
Do you think those services are “free”? If you want cloud storage and syncing, it comes at a price. If you’re not paying with money, you’re paying with your privacy and freedom.
I think syncing kilobytes costs next to nothing and if they can't manage it then let me put in my own URL and I'll host it myself.
(And "my own URL" realistically includes Google and Dropbox and OneDrive and iCloud, not just nerd stuff. And even without automatic backups it should hold on to everything and give me an export button.)
We are not required to permit every possible business model to exist. Companies are desperately trying to get their hands on every piece of data they can get to train AI, hence the abominable use of "opt out", which is already horrible even without the added bait-and-switch coercion of "or we'll make the device you already purchased worse".
"pay or consent" stunts have already been ruled illegal under the GDPR. This goes even further than that, where you don't even have the option to pay.
> I really feel like "grab" is quite condescending to a company (Samsung) that provides services at scale (upon/after consent) to help you.. "be better" (simplified..), with direct customization and tailoring.
The headline as described sounds to me like they're violating GDPR by tying to force "consent" for a not-strictly-necessary-for-functionality use of health data. The European Data Protection Board has repeatedly stated that consent is (generally) not considered to be "freely given" if there is a significant detriment for refusing it or if the user has no genuine choice.
Note however that caveat: as described. There may be some more details which make this not unlawful. Also, actually deleting your data if you don't consent is the kind of thing GDPR requires.
So you buy a device but you can't effectively use half of its features because you'd also have to agree to send them your medical records? Ok then if I refuse, will they refund 50% of the device price since now it's not usable any more?