Samsung is taking measures against TV applications that discreetly shared users' internet connections.

      Researchers discovered that certain apps continued to share your internet connection even after they were closed.

      I've never imagined that my smart TV might be sharing its internet connection with others. Yet, this seems to be the case for millions of Samsung smart TV users.

      What exactly did the researchers uncover?

      The Norwegian cybersecurity company Mnemonic found that several popular Samsung smart TV apps—some of which are reportedly installed on hundreds of millions of devices—contain code that stealthily shares the internet connection of the owner without their consent.

      One of the flagged apps was a Pac-Man game that Samsung had ironically highlighted in its "Editor’s Choice" section. This game included code from Bright Data, an Israel-based internet firm that manages proxy networks, claiming access to millions of residential internet connections worldwide, in addition to selling data harvested from those networks.

      When you launch an app that includes such code and agree to a consent prompt—which most users likely click through without fully reading—the smart TV functions as what is termed a residential proxy. This means the code discreetly routes traffic from external users through your home internet connection.

      And there's more. This routing continues even after you close the app, remaining active until you fully uninstall it from your smart TV. Harrison Sand, a security consultant at Mnemonic, cautioned that a modification of a single piece of code on a remote server could theoretically turn hundreds of millions of these TVs into a botnet simultaneously, without any consent from users.

      Samsung's response?

      Interestingly, Sand noted that much of the traffic that passed through his TV—without his consent—seemed to be associated with mass scraping of LinkedIn profiles and gathering data for AI training. However, he only observed a minor portion of Bright Data's entire network.

      For its part, Samsung informed TechCrunch that it is now banning apps that share user connections (which it should), has already limited new app registrations that employ proxy functionality, and is working on identifying and removing existing violators from its app store.

      This follows LG’s own ban last month, as similar reports indicated that roughly 42% of apps in LG’s store were doing the same thing. After reading this, I plan to check my smart TV for apps that I don't recall installing or that I rarely use, and I will uninstall them immediately—and you should consider doing the same.

      For over five years, Shikhar has regularly simplified advancements in consumer technology and presented them…

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