Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Headquartered in South Korea, Samsung is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of consumer electronics. After Google, it is the world’s largest producer of the Android operating system. In 2024, it shipped 223.5 million smartphones, maintaining its place as one of the top three smartphone vendors worldwide.
Samsung remained a manufacturing powerhouse in a period of AI-driven technological upheavals, commanding around a quarter of the global smartphone market. While it made decisive progress on privacy and security in this year’s RDR Index, it still remained near the bottom of the benchmark due to persistent gaps in transparency on core freedom of expression and privacy issues.
Between 2021 and 2024, Samsung fought two class-action lawsuits in the U.S. state of Illinois, both alleging that the company’s use of biometric data on Samsung devices violated customers’ privacy rights. The lawsuits claimed that Samsung harvested, stored, and used people’s sensitive data, including facial recognition scans, unlawfully and without consent.
Both lawsuits were ultimately dismissed, but allegations of algorithmic surveillance and invasive use of facial recognition continued to haunt the company. Samsung Display, a subsidiary specializing in screen manufacturing, ignited controversy by testing a facial recognition system to monitor remote workers, allegedly to prevent leaks of sensitive code. Samsung came under fire again in late 2024 when researchers discovered a “ Shazam-like tracking technology” with nebulous opt-out pathways in Samsung’s smart TVs. The parent company had previously banned the use of generative AI chatbots by employees after a worker uploaded sensitive source code to ChatGPT.
On the antitrust front, Samsung faced additional scrutiny for alleged anti-competitive behavior in India, the U.S., and the EU. In September 2024, the Competition Commission of India accused Samsung of colluding with Amazon and Flipkart to launch products exclusively on their websites, in violation of competition law. That same month, video game maker Epic Games sued Google and Samsung, claiming the companies coordinated to stifle third-party competition on their app stores. The lawsuit came on the heels of a landmark ruling establishing that Google maintained an illegal monopoly by paying Apple and Samsung billions of dollars to serve as users’ default search engine. Investigations in the EU also focused on Samsung’s partnership with Google, exploring whether a multi-year generative AI chatbot deal between the two companies hindered their competitors.
Despite these multiplying challenges, Samsung published a series of new disclosures, making it the most improved platform company on privacy in the 2025 RDR Index by a wide margin. Yet it faltered on high-level governance and freedom of expression issues, as it has since the first RDR assessment in 2017. Its custom implementation of the Android operating system continued to trail its counterparts from Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) in all categories, despite the company holding the largest share of the Android device market.
The 2025 RDR Index: Big Tech Edition covers policies that were active on August 1, 2024. Policies that came into effect after August 1, 2024, were not evaluated for this benchmark.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
Samsung underperformed most of its peers on governance processes, ranking tenth out of 14 companies. While it was the only company to explicitly ground its AI Ethics Principles in international human rights standards (G1), it was hindered by its lack of transparency in other areas. Samsung failed to explain who exercises oversight of freedom of expression and privacy issues at most levels, falling short of the firmly established industry standard (G2). Its Privacy Legal Management System was the only evidence it disclosed of structured human rights due diligence in relation to privacy and freedom of expression (G4). It also did not demonstrate any consistent stakeholder engagement on freedom of expression and privacy issues (G5). Further, Samsung’s Galaxy Store was the only one of the three mobile ecosystem services with no sign of a content moderation appeals process—a key component of grievance and remedy mechanisms (G6b).
Samsung recorded the poorest performance of all 14 companies in the freedom of expression area. It was also one of only two companies with an overall score decline, driven by a new policy that extended identity verification to all users of its services in South Korea. Its content governance disclosures lagged behind most other companies, with no information on how it identifies violations to the rules of its Galaxy Store, and no enforcement data (F3a, F4). Samsung also remained silent on how it handles government demands to restrict content, even though no law prohibits Korean companies from disclosing information about such requests (F5, F6). While it published rules governing advertising content, it did not couple them with rules for targeted advertising (F3b, F3c). The company also lacked disclosure on algorithmic use policies (F1d).
Samsung jumped by nine percentage points in the privacy category, showing by far the greatest improvement among the 14 companies. Nonetheless, it ranked ninth overall. It conveyed critical new details in its updated Privacy Policy, including the types of information it collects, why it makes inferences, how it uses cookies and combines data from different services, and how soon it deletes data after a user terminates their account (P3a, P5, P6, P9). Its Galaxy Store maintained robust privacy requirements for third-party apps (P3a, P6, P8). Samsung’s new disclosures about its data breach protocols (P15) as well as internal and external security audits (P13) solidified its progress. Notably, it became the first company in the RDR Index to offer security updates for its devices for more than five years, setting a new bar in protection against digital threats (P14). Samsung’s critical weakness in this area was government demands for users’ data, where it still lacked even rudimentary procedural disclosure, despite its South Korean peer Kakao continuing to provide this information (P10a, P11a).