Samsung Galaxy Watch4

This device tracks your location, heart rate, sleep patterns, stress and more. That's a lot of personal information gathered in one place. And not gonna lie, it sure seems Samsung likes to collect a lot of personal 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. And while Samsung doesn't seem to sell your healthy data they collect from this watch, they do say they can combine this with other you provide or they collect to send you personalized content. This likely isn't terrible, however, it is a lot of very personal health data they are using.

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. That means it's possible you could have crazy insomnia and sleep terribly for a couple months, which your Galaxy Watch knows. Samsung could then target you content about how to sleep better, which just stresses you out and makes you sleep worse. OK, this is probably not likely. But it’s also not impossible.