Samsung's new Galaxy television ad is all about user privacy

We've seen Apple use television commercials to promote some of its iPhone privacy features. The ad that Apple created last year for its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature showed how a young guy, using his iPhone to pay for coffee and a rideshare to a meeting at the bank was having his personal data collected by people representing third-party apps. Even the purchase of some embarrassing anti-itch creme was duly noted by these apps.

"Choose who tracks your information," said the tagline. And by pressing the button allowing him to use ATT to opt-out of being tracked, all of those third-party trackers disappeared.

In the shadow of last week's unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy S22 line, Samsung has released a privacy video of its own. Weighing in at 94 seconds, a little snipping by the company's obviously talented group of editors will bring this down to the usual 30/60 second window for television. A young girl notes that her life is on her phone and as she unlocks her handset with the under-display fingerprint scanner, she says that she doesn't want to be followed by sneaky apps that track her every move.

With the Samsung privacy dashboard, users know which apps are using their camera, microphone, and location data. Disabling the precise location toggle will allow apps to know your approximate, but not precise, location. With Samsung's privacy features, our heroine can hide her exact location from a weather app, or share it with a rideshare app but only when she needs a ride.

And food delivery apps can be told to ask for the user's address every time an order is placed-but at no other time. Privacy is now in the user's hands which is why Samsung titles the ad  "Samsung Privacy: You're in control." And as the ad comes to a close, the tag line surfaces: "Your privacy. Secured."

While Apple and Samsung have run two different ads to promote privacy on their phones, the point of both is the same. By disrupting the tracking process used by apps and websites, users' data won't be collected by third parties in order to send ppersonalized online ads.

Not everyone is opposed to sharing their location data with trackers since it often results in the receipt of special discounts at stores that the user is nearby. And it might also make things easier when you're shopping for a particular product. As with much of life, the decision is yours.

We already know from Facebook Meta that Apple's ATT opt-out program is expected to cost the firm a whopping $10 billion in ad revenue this year. During the social media star's latest conference call with investors and the financial media, Meta CFO Dave Wehner said, "We believe the impact of iOS overall is a headwind on our business in 2022." And this doesn't include any loss of revenue from any privacy features found on Android handsets.

Google's decisions when it comes to trackers are undoubtedly tough for the company. On one hand, it wants to present Android as being an operating system that can stop users from being tracked. But on the other hand, the Alphabet unit took in $61.24 billion in ad revenue during the fourth quarter, up 33% on an annual basis. But even though the cost of obtaining the traffic needed to generate that amount of money rose 28%, Google spent $2.96 billion more during the quarter on an annual basis to take in an additional $15.04 billion in ad revenue over the three months.

And by the way, if you're looking to disable tracking on Android, turning off Location History will not help. What you need to do is pause Web & App activity. Doing this will reduce your phone's ability to deliver relevant searches or recommendations on all apps and devices signed into your Google account.

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To disable this setting go to myactivity.google.com and click on Web & App Activity. You'll see the "On" button on the left and the "Turn off" button on the right.

You can also stop personalized ads on an Android phone by going to Settings > Privacy > Ads; tap on Delete advertising ID. That deletes the unique advertising ID that is used to follow you around third-party apps and websites.