Samsung Galaxy Buds

Not gonna lie, it sure seems Samsung likes to collect a lot of data on users, share (and possibly sell) that data around lots of places, and make it hard for you to figure out how to opt-out of that data sharing.

Your dogged privacy researcher spent quite a lot of time on Samsung’s website trying to understand how to opt-out under their “Do Not Sell” option as part of California’s privacy law called CCPA. It was clunky and complicated and she was never quite clear if she succeeded or not. Samsung does extend the rights that protect users under CCPA to all of the United States, which is good. And Samsung users in Europe are protected by their privacy protection law, GDPR, to a degree.

What could go wrong? Well, Samsung likes to show ads tailored to you through various ad networks, and say they do a lot of tracking of your online activities to do so. These headphones come with a voice assistant named Bixby that will listen for your voice commands. Samsung may use your interactions with Bixby to learn more about you and then target you with ads or share this data with others who may use it to target you. That means it's possible you could ask Bixby to play lots of sappy love songs over and over. Marketers could use this information to target you with ads for very expensive engagement rings. Then love sick you spends way too much money on a ring for your significant other and you get turned down, leaving you poor and heartbroken. OK, this is probably not likely, but also not impossible in our digital ad economy.