For many people, luck comes in streaks, and if that's the case, Samsung is clearly having a rough one. As if the scandal of the televisions that listen wasn't enough, reports have emerged that its smart TVs are inserting ads into movies from external video services, to the point of pausing the film to show the ad.
A growing debate over smart TV privacy
Privacy policies on smart TVs are generating an increasingly heated debate between users and manufacturers. After what happened with Samsung and their televisions that don't know how to cover their ears, it wasn't hard to find similar cases. In May of last year, TechDirt published an unpleasant incident involving some LG TVs, which basically disable most of their smart functions if the user isn't willing to share information. I decided to take a closer look at LG's current privacy policies, and I wasn't surprised to find a nearly identical clause regarding voice recognition, which makes the whole situation even more worrying. However, what brings us here again is Samsung, and its latest stumble involves advertising.
Ads creep into Plex and Foxtel
The story began on the subreddit dedicated to the Plex service. Until recently, everything seemed fine between Plex and Samsung smart TVs, but in the last few days several users discovered that their televisions started inserting ads into the movies they were watching. The film pauses about half an hour in, and a video ad appears without audio. At first it was thought Plex might have something to do with it, but being a cross-platform service, other users on PCs and PlayStation 4 consoles didn't find any surprise ads. All fingers pointed to Samsung when users of the Australian streaming service Foxtel reported similar ads, all on Samsung smart TVs. Another piece of evidence is that the ads appeared after a Smart Hub update.
Samsung's response and the fix
Samsung has acknowledged it's a mistake and will take the necessary measures to prevent it from happening again. Why did the ads appear? The answer requires a trip back to January 2014. Back then, Samsung developed Samsung developed a kind of agreement with Yahoo! to show ads on its smart TVs, but that feature is "opt-in", meaning the user has to activate it voluntarily. The latest software update seems to have activated the ads by default, and that's how we got here. How to undo it? Go to Smart Hub, then to Terms and Policies, and then to the Yahoo! Privacy Policy, indicating at the end that you don't agree with it. That should stop the ads.
The incidents keep piling up, and smart TVs are quickly losing their appeal. We'll soon see what kind of damage control the companies apply.
