I own a Samsung smartphone, earbuds and watch, what can I say… I got a good discount buying all three.
As I already own the devices, is it worth, privacy wise, using the Samsung Health and Samsung Wear to get the best out of the devices?
From what I gathered, the apps are not strictly necessary for the usage, but would allow me the access to all featutes available from my devices.
What do you guys think?
I usually have some difficulty balancing convenience and privacy, specialty for devices I already. Now when considering the purchase of a new device, good privacy one of my main concerns.
First off, have you actually looked at the privacy policy of Samsung Health and Samsung Wear?
We can’t give much advice on whether you should use these apps or not. Most people here would advise you to throw these devices away and buy a Pixel with Graphene OS.
On the other hand, you can still technically keep using a Samsung device as long as you don’t fall for feature creep. A huge trap most people have on their privacy journey involves this mentality of utilizing features you don’t need.
Like, do you really need to track your steps and heartbeat rate on a daily basis? Can you customize settings to reduce the amount of potential data collection that these apps may collect?
Yes I checked the privacy polices, they’re not the best.
I live in Brazil, Samsung is the only way to get good new tech for a “good” price. Google pixel isn’t available I’m brasil, some stores sell them but they are quite overpriced, when I bought my devices I wasn’t really concerned with privacy, financially, going for Samsung just made sense.
And yes, I can keep using the devices without these apps. I can check the info gathered by the watch directly on the device, and besides equalisation and proper configuration of the earbuds, there isn’t really a necessity for continuous usage of the Samsung Wear app. At leat that’s what I think, I haven’t been using those apps for a long time, I just wanted to be sure that what I’m missing out isn’t worth the privacy I get to keep.
Sorry for not quoting what you said, I’m new to the platform and don’t really know how to. I’ll figure it out eventually.
Hope my all I said made sense, as I mentioned, im from Brazil, my mother tongue is actually Portuguese.
That answers your question! If you are surviving with the features you have right now, there is really no need to enable them.
The best way to maintain some semblance of privacy with Samsung devices is to reduce the information collection through your device and app settings. Digital minimalism is key here
As someone who owns a Samsung phone, using it with a Samsung account is almost completely pointless. If you have Galaxy buds or smart watch, you can use the Wearable app to pair your devices, but you don’t need an account for that. I’ve never used Health, but if you can use it to monitor your activities or track your steps / calories without an account, it can minimize the amount of data that Samsung is able to collect.