Samsung Confirms Upgrade Choice—Galaxy Users Must Now Decide
This decision defines the future of your phone.
Republished on June 8 with serious new concerns for Samsung and its users.
A timely warning from Samsung this week, which neatly sets out the biggest upgrade decision now facing Android users. As whispers start to spread suggesting a disconnect between Samsung and Google at the heart of Android, this is critical.
We’re talking AI and the new offerings now hitting phones and PCs at breakneck speed, with stark differences in where your private data is processed and stored, and who can access it. This is where Galaxy has an advantage, Samsung says, “in privacy-first, AI-powered experiences” which can “protect you in the era of AI.”
The user decision now proposed by the Galaxy-maker is the right one: “This level of personalization” brought by AI “can be incredibly helpful, but the more your phone knows, the more there is to protect. So, what’s keeping all that personal data secure?” The challenge at the moment is that users are being hit from all directions with buzzy new features. Privacy has taken a backseat. But that will change.
Samsung’s answer is Knox. “Every Galaxy device is protected from the chip up by a multi-layered approach, which includes on-device personalization, user-controlled cloud processing, and ecosystem-wide protection through Samsung Knox Matrix.” It’s marketing spin and the core isn’t new, but it has taken on a new level of importance given the blurring of lines between our phones and someone else’s cloud.
Put simply, this is Samsung’s secure ecosystem and the closest replica to Apple’s securely walled garden currently on Android. It makes Samsung more sticky as well as more secure, the more Samsung devices you connect, the more effective it is. And “at the core of this system is Samsung Knox Vault, Samsung’s hardware-based solution for your most sensitive information,” which will change as the AI tidal wave continues.
While Knox is not new and neither is the concept of hardware-enabled data security. What is new is segmenting sensitive the latest AI-related data from the rest, and securing that alongside the more traditional PINs, passwords and credit card numbers.
“Location service metadata from your most personal photos,” Samsung says, “could easily give away the exact location where the image was taken.” And there’s not much data more sensitive than who did what, where and when.
As Vox has just warned, “AI can now stalk you with just a single vacation photo. Artificial intelligence could weaponize the data we’ve been sharing for decades… For decades, digital privacy advocates have been warning the public to be more careful about what we share online. And for the most part, the public has cheerfully ignored them.” But now, “even for people indifferent to digital privacy like myself, AI is going to change the game in a way that I find pretty terrifying.”
“In the era of AI, personal information like your home address, face clustering ID, person ID, pet type, scene type and more need to be encrypted and stored in a safe location,” Samsung says. “These things aren’t just files — they are deeply connected to your daily life.” Our approach to metadata isn’t yet ready for an AI revolution.
It’s unclear exactly what is being or will be segmented and how this plays into the various opt-ins that Samsung has added to distinguish between on-device and cloud AI, between what is only within your secure enclave and what is outside.
But it’s difficult not to read this push as a play against the latest announcements from Google and the cloud-based AI that will now run riot across sensitive data, including emails and even cloud data storage. Yes, there are always opt-outs, but users now need to decide whether to enable Google’s AI upgrades, which do not also secure data in this way, and which arguably undermine much of what Samsung is offering.
“As Galaxy AI becomes more useful,” Samsung says, “it also becomes more personal — learning how you use your device and adapting to your needs… Knox Vault is more than a security feature, it’s Galaxy’s promise that no matter how advanced your devices become, or how much AI evolves, your privacy is secured.”
Google, meanwhile, will not make this decision easy for Samsung user. No one is rolling out new smartphone AI innovations faster, and it will always overshadow what can be done if users take a privacy-centric, device-only approach.
Per Android Police, the latest update is “Google’s Gemini replacing Google Assistant as the default AI assistant, taking on all digital assistance responsibilities as Assistant is phased out later this year. Gemini is gaining ‘Scheduled Actions,’ allowing users to automate recurring tasks and information delivery at specific times.”
This is the stepping stone to so-called Agentic AI on phones, where monitoring data and events and activities enables an agent to make decisions autonomously on a smartphone owner’s behalf. This next step, with “Scheduled Actions streamlining routines [and] offering personalized updates,” is just the start.
As Mashable says, “When combined with computer vision, which is what allows a model to ‘see’ a user’s screen, we get the agentic AI everyone is so excited about… Agentic AI tools could order groceries online, browse and buy the best-reviewed espresso machine for you, or even research and book vacations. In fact, Google is already taking steps in this direction with its new AI shopping experience.”
Allowing AI access to smartphones with all the data and insight they contain, pushes this to a level even beyond Windows’s controversial Recall. Before this goes on much longer, users will need to decide how far is too far. Remember, once you open access to your personal or private data, it’s hard to pout the Genie back in the bottle.
Look no further than OpenAI’s announcement that “ChatGPT can now connect to more internal sources & pull in real-time context—keeping existing user-level permissions. Connectors available in deep research for Plus & Pro users (excl. EEA, CH, UK) and Team, Enterprise & Edu users: Outlook, Teams, Google Drive, Gmail, Linear & more.”
This comes just as OpenAI is hit with a lawsuit to force the ChatGPT owner “to retain all user content indefinitely, in its fight with media copyright holders. OpenAI says this is “a sweeping and unnecessary demand in [the] baseless lawsuit against us,” one which it says, “fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments we have made to our users. It abandons long-standing privacy norms and weakens privacy protections.”
But from a user perspective, this plays into the on-device, private by design enclave that Apple (notwithstanding its AI issues) has pushed and which Samsung wants to — at least in part — replicate. As Gizmodo points out, “I couldn’t imagine having a ChatGPT log sensitive enough data that I’d care if someone else read it. However, people do use ChatGPT as a therapist, for life advice, and even treat it as a romantic partner… They deserve the right to keep that content private.”
Meanwhile, Samsung has other complexities to manage on the AI front. As SammyFans reports this weekend, “the Galaxy S26 series would push boundaries with upgraded AI and a new 200MP camera, but Samsung may still face a tricky road ahead, with technical challenges, political tensions, and tariffs threatening its premium status, especially in the U.S. Samsung is betting big on AI for the Galaxy S26 series, [but] if diplomatic issues drag on, these collaborations could hit snags.”