Samsung said on August 3 that it is blocking new smart TV apps that can share a household internet connection through residential proxy networks, while working to identify and remove existing apps that contain the same functionality.
The company’s current developer documentation now says residential proxy functionality, including the Bright Data SDK, is not permitted in Samsung TV app packages. Samsung also told TechCrunch that it had restricted new registrations and was implementing a platform-wide ban.
The change addresses a real privacy and security concern, but it needs one important qualification: finding proxy software inside an app does not prove that a television was actively relaying traffic. An embedded SDK, a remotely enabled SDK, and a user-approved proxy connection are three different states.
What Samsung’s smart TV proxy app ban changes
Samsung’s action covers both new submissions and apps already in its store. Its developer guide lists residential proxy functionality among the conditions checked when a Tizen app package is uploaded. For the existing catalog, however, Samsung has only said that identification and removal work is underway. It has not published a complete affected-app list or a removal deadline.
A residential proxy lets a third party send internet requests through another person’s home connection. To websites and online services, that traffic appears to come from the household’s public IP address rather than the proxy customer’s original location.
The technology has legitimate uses, including public-web data collection and ad verification. It can also help abusive traffic resemble ordinary household activity, making fraud, scraping and cyberattacks harder to detect. For a TV owner, the immediate issue is that outside traffic may be attributed to the home connection even though nobody in the household initiated it.
An installed SDK is not automatically an active proxy
Mnemonic’s investigation of Samsung Tizen apps shows why the distinction matters.
The proxy code can be present but dormant
Researchers found Bright Data’s SDK inside Play. Works games, including a Pac-Man app that had appeared in Samsung’s Editor’s Choice section. Installing and opening Pac-Man did not automatically make the researchers’ TV an exit node. The proxy component was present, but its remote configuration was disabled when they tested it.
That finding means it would be inaccurate to describe every Pac-Man installation, or every app containing the SDK, as an active proxy or botnet member.
A server can remotely enable the feature
The Play works apps fetched configuration and game code from a remote server. Mnemonic found the proxy switch enabled for a football-themed 2048 game, while Pac-Man’s switch was off at the time of testing.
This design creates an enforcement problem. A store may inspect one package during review, but the app can later load different code or settings from the developer’s server. Samsung’s new package rule is clear; continuously detecting functionality delivered after approval is more difficult.
Consent starts the background service
When the tested proxy feature was enabled, the app displayed a consent screen. After the user accepted, a Tizen background service could keep running after the user left the app and continue until the app was deleted.
Bright Data says its network is consent-based, performs customer checks, and limits use to approved purposes. The company also says its SDK does not collect end-user personal information beyond the IP resources needed for the service.
The policy debate is therefore not only about whether a prompt exists, but whether a person navigating a TV with a remote understands that choosing an ad-free option can allow third-party traffic to use the household connection.
How widespread were proxy SDKs in smart TV apps?
Spur Intelligence scanned 6,038 app packages across Samsung Tizen and LG webOS and identified residential proxy SDK fingerprints in 2,058 of them. Its analysis put the prevalence at 26.9% among the Samsung Tizen apps it examined and 42.5% among the LG webOS apps.
Those figures measure code found in app packages, not the number of televisions actively operating as proxy nodes. They also do not establish that every detected app was malicious. Spur identified SDKs from multiple providers and said publishers using the names Bright Data, Bright Data Ltd. and Bright SDK accounted for 367 proxy-flagged apps across its combined dataset.
Mnemonic separately cited Play. Works’ own claim that its game portfolio had installations in more than 400 million homes. That is a publisher-level marketing claim, not a verified count of Samsung TVs containing an enabled proxy, consenting users, or active exit nodes.
What Samsung TV owners should do
Samsung has not released a definitive list of apps scheduled for removal, so owners cannot reliably check one official list. A practical review is still possible:
- Delete games, screensavers, clocks and other TV apps you no longer use or do not recognize.
- Treat any offer of an ad-free experience in exchange for sharing “idle resources,” bandwidth or an IP address as a proxy-network decision, not a routine advertising preference.
- If you previously accepted such an offer and no longer want to participate, delete the associated app. Mnemonic’s test found that leaving the app was not enough to stop its activated background service.
- Keep the TV software updated and periodically review installed apps, just as you would on a phone or computer.
- If unexplained proxy activity persists on the home network, review other connected devices and router settings as well; the TV may not be the only possible source.
Finding a proxy does not by itself mean the TV was hacked. Consent-based proxy software and malware-controlled botnets are not interchangeable, even though both can route traffic through a residential IP address.
Removal remains the unanswered part
Samsung’s public developer rule now gives app makers an unambiguous answer, residential proxy functionality is not allowed. What owners still lack is a removal schedule, a full list of affected apps, and data showing how many Samsung TVs ever became active exit nodes.
The ban should reduce new proxy-enabled submissions. Its larger test will be whether Samsung can find existing components and detect remotely loaded changes that do not appear in the original app package.
