Samsung security, privacy and general software qualify are all a joke as far as I can tell and it’s amusing anyone would put them in even the same ballpark as Google.

Dog bites man is not news, and neither are most of the Samsung software travesties ranging from software supply chain debacles to TV spying to data breaches.

Nobody even cares in the tech community because no one expects anything of them.

We were just talking about privacy, in that sense I think Samsung is roughly at the same level (considering it can't get much worse than Google :) ).

I think Google is doing a good job with their Pixel phones indeed in terms of security, though they need longer support IMO. Samsung seems to just call everything 'knox' but not really specify what exactly they're doing. So from a security point of view I agree.

> considering it can't get much worse than Google :)

What? It can get way worse than Google. For all the privacy invasive things that Google does it’s one of the least bad. Unlike most companies that collect data it doesn’t directly sell user data, and it has a good history of avoiding security vulnerabilities that leak data.

Avoiding vulnerabilities that leak data to others except themselves you mean :)

I suppose the Chinese state and the apps they control like WeChat is worse in terms of what they do with the data (this social credit score etc). You're right. I was mainly thinking about the collection itself, not what is done with it.

What I mind mainly about Google is that they use it as payment for their services but don't provide any option to opt out and just pay with money. Though I suppose even if they did that at this stage, I wouldn't trust them.

> I think Samsung is roughly at the same level (considering it can't get much worse than Google :) )

Well, what about Huawei who want to send your data to China?

True but Huawei is no longer a player on western markets. I didn't really consider them.

After installing NoRoot Firewall on my phone, I discovered that every single Samsung app was phoning home: camera, gallery, contacts, bixby, health, messaging, etc. On the upside, I was able to remove 99% of the pre-installed apps without any special tools. The only one that refused to go was bixy (and no way to reprogram the dedicated button), but at least it can be "disabled" and denied all permissions via Android's app manager.

> On the upside, I was able to remove 99% of the pre-installed apps without any special tools.

I wish I could do this. I have 32 GB space on my phone. Half of it is wasted on pre-installed junk I cannot delete because "it came with the phone". This involves games, or something like "Booking.com", and so forth.

> Samsung isn't much better than Google on the privacy side.

Samsung is vastly worse. Consider off the bat that South Korea has wildly different (read ‘permissive and lax’) laws about police and government access to stored data.