Privacy and security issues have been hounding brands like Google, Facebook, and Apple, for so long. Samsung was able to escape closer scrutiny but it seems like it’s now time for them to be in the limelight. People are pointing out that the company’s new privacy policy, amended because of the new California privacy law, shows that they may have been reselling your data to third parties all along. This is a common practice that people are becoming more aware of now and are fighting to remove or at least amend.
Computer World wrote a long article about why we should be bothered that Samsung is selling our data and that they may have been doing so for some time now. Samsung may have been double-dipping into all the information that Google is gathering about our phone usage and then selling said data to third parties to directly profit from it. Even worse, they may not have been upfront about it and we’re only learning now because they had to revise their privacy policy.
Google has been mostly clear about how they collect and use our data to bring us “better” services and free apps. This is part of their business model and they have websites and features dedicated to this so users can understand. But what they don’t do is share that data with anyone, as far as we know now. Samsung has created “an intricate system” in terms of data collection and then earned extra money by selling it to advertisers or research groups.
In their new privacy policy, Samsung lays out that they get information from your device and social media, including search history and browser history and MAY resell it to partner companies, advertising networks, and legal offices. It also mentions that they use other private data like signature, credit card number, and “other financial information” to personalize advertisements for you but says they don’t sell that particular data.
How Samsung will respond to this will be crucial. And how bothered users will be will also be interesting to see. Some of us have gotten pretty blasé about it as long as we still get to use our devices and get apps for free. But there are still those who will want to fight for their right to privacy from companies that seek to make more money out of our data.
