Samsung is banning and pulling smart TV apps that secretly shared owners’ home internet connections with total strangers. The company confirmed the crackdown after new research found some apps could quietly turn a Samsung TV into a tunnel for someone else’s web traffic.
If you own one of these TVs, here’s why that matters: you may never know it’s happening. Some apps loaded hidden software that let outside companies route their own internet traffic through your home connection, making it look like it came from you. One of the flagged apps was a simple Pac-Man game that Samsung had featured in its own Editor’s Choice section.
How your TV could get used without you knowing
Security researchers at Mnemonic found the issue while digging into Samsung’s TV software. They discovered that certain apps, often little more than a shell that loads content from another website, quietly include code from what’s known as a residential proxy network. That code lets a stranger, sometimes a business scraping data from the web, tunnel their traffic through your TV’s internet connection instead of their own.
Mnemonic’s researcher said the risky code usually stays dormant until someone clicks through a consent screen most people probably don’t read closely. Once accepted, the app keeps running in the background even after you close it. Researcher Harrison Sand warned that a simple change on a company’s server could flip the feature on for hundreds of millions of TVs at once.
Samsung isn’t alone here. LG said last month it would ban similar apps too, after reports found roughly 42% of the apps in its own store were doing something similar.
What you should do now
Samsung says it’s already blocking new apps that use this kind of code and working to pull existing ones that contain it. In the meantime, it’s worth checking your Samsung TV for apps you don’t recognize, especially free games, and deleting anything suspicious.
If you accepted a consent screen you don’t remember agreeing to, that’s worth revisiting too. Samsung hasn’t published a list of affected apps yet, so the safest move is to clean up unused apps and keep an eye on updates from Samsung’s support pages.
