Samsung Galaxy S26 series shipped with the newest features of Now Brief, an automated daily briefing feature that curates important information, tasks, and notifications that may improve your user experience.

Despite it being a good idea, the Now brief failed to impress users due to its low-accuracy of what Samsung promoted it to be. Most of the time, the feature shows weather, news article and YouTube video recommendations from your subscribed channels. And sometimes, it includes your photographs (from a particular day) and weekly screen time. Beyond that, the “Content to include” section has numerous categories that are part of the daily briefing.

However, the feature execution matters. The company has added a weather widget in the briefing, a news article that doesn’t refresh; if so, it’s not interesting. Most Galaxy S26 series and previous device owners may have been scrolling through videos on the YouTube app instead of waiting for them to appear slowly on their daily briefing. These might be a good example of how useless the feature could be.

That said, I recently started using Now Brief on a daily basis to test “Get richer insights“. It has YouTube and Gemini toggles; once enabled, they promise to deliver personalized content inside daily briefings. Yet, the company is asking for almost all of the important user data for personalized videos. Below is an example for YouTube.

“If you turn on this option, your schedule, reservation, and booking information from Samsung Wallet, Notifications, Messages, Calendar, Reminder, and Gmail information, and sports information from your Google Account, sports information from apps you use, the titles of websites you visit, and YouTube videos you watch that are analysed on your phone by Personal data intelligence will be shared with Google, who will collect and process this data to provide recommended travel and sports videos” reads the agreement pop-up.

So, it’s not a normal slider; Samsung wants you to give consent for Now Brief to access all of this information in exchange to get video recommendation. It’s hard to say, there will be a person who reads this information, and gives Now brief consent in exchange for YouTube video recommendations. All they need to do is open the app and explore whatever they want to watch or see.

It’s not like they can’t disable the feature, but the feature will start sipping this data as soon as you tap on the slider.

The other side of the matter is the depth of such information, including your wallet. Why should we be providing this information to see videos? It doesn’t mean that companies don’t farm data to train AI, but Samsung offering YouTube video recommendations in exchange for vital user data should only be called “data farming.”

Of course, it’s on the user to decide on the consent, but you should not overlook the intent.

The post Samsung Now Brief is farming user data for Google appeared first on Sammy Fans.

Samsung continues to add new AI features in the Galaxy AI Suite and also updates the old ones, such as Now Brief, to make it user-friendly. This feature gathers the important moments from your device, such as Gallery pictures, energy score, sleep schedule, alarm, wallet, and more, and puts them in a single briefing curated with AI.

Talking about the new stuff, the Galaxy S26 series has brought a few additions to the Now brief that aren’t available for the Galaxy S26 series.

There’s a new section in the Now brief settings, “Get richer insights”. It shares your personal data with Samsung’s partner companies to receive “relevant” and “personalized” content in your daily briefings. There are two partners currently added in the settings: YouTube and Gemini.

YouTube will suggest more videos to you, and Gemini will give you some insights into your daily Gemini use case. After enabling these two, I am not getting anything useful, and whatever you may call it, it doesn’t make Now brief any more interesting, an element that’s lacking from the very beginning.

The concept of the Now brief is great, but its results aren’t nowhere near “great” word. So, Samsung should focus on providing some user-centric statistics that are not based on AI fantasy. It lacks preciseness of all of the things that the phone maker has promised to offer with content addons. These two features might expand to other Galaxy S25 series devices with stable One UI 8.5, but we’re not sure about that.

If you found these options useful, reach out to me at X/Twitter handle. I would love to read your thoughts on the upgraded Now Brief.

The post Even my Galaxy S26 Ultra can’t make Now Brief look useful appeared first on Sammy Fans.