The detail that got me in the Mnemonic write-up isn't that Samsung TV apps were reselling residential bandwidth. It's which app. A Pac-Man game that Samsung itself had put in the Editor's Choice row. Not something sideloaded, not a sketchy IPTV player you had to go hunting for. The store's own recommendation shelf.
The mechanism is worse than a background service too. You open the app, tap through a consent screen nobody reads, and your connection joins Bright Data's residential proxy pool. Close the app and it keeps running. It only stops when you uninstall. So every one of those try-it-once-and-forget apps sitting on your home screen may still be routing somebody else's traffic through your line. Harrison Sand at Mnemonic said the slice he could see was mostly LinkedIn scraping and AI training data collection, and that one change on a remote server could flip the whole install base at once.
Samsung's answer is to ban apps that do this and stop registering new ones with proxy functionality. LG did the same last month, and the reporting there put roughly 42% of its store in that category. Forty-two percent. That isn't a few bad actors, that is the business model of free TV apps.
What bothers me longer term is that neither platform has ever given us a way to see what an installed app is doing on the network. No per-app traffic view, no connection log, nothing. The fix here is a store policy, which holds until the next wrapper SDK shows up under different branding.
Has anyone here actually put a TV on its own VLAN and watched what it talks to at idle? Genuinely curious what clean looks like.
The mechanism is worse than a background service too. You open the app, tap through a consent screen nobody reads, and your connection joins Bright Data's residential proxy pool. Close the app and it keeps running. It only stops when you uninstall. So every one of those try-it-once-and-forget apps sitting on your home screen may still be routing somebody else's traffic through your line. Harrison Sand at Mnemonic said the slice he could see was mostly LinkedIn scraping and AI training data collection, and that one change on a remote server could flip the whole install base at once.
Samsung's answer is to ban apps that do this and stop registering new ones with proxy functionality. LG did the same last month, and the reporting there put roughly 42% of its store in that category. Forty-two percent. That isn't a few bad actors, that is the business model of free TV apps.
What bothers me longer term is that neither platform has ever given us a way to see what an installed app is doing on the network. No per-app traffic view, no connection log, nothing. The fix here is a store policy, which holds until the next wrapper SDK shows up under different branding.
Has anyone here actually put a TV on its own VLAN and watched what it talks to at idle? Genuinely curious what clean looks like.
