If your television runs webOS or Tizen, there is a real chance one of its apps has spent the past few months quietly renting out your internet connection. Security firm Spur scanned 6,038 apps across LG's and Samsung's smart TV stores and found residential proxy code in 34.1% of them — 42.5% on LG, 26.9% on Samsung. That research is from June 23; what changed is that both companies have since responded, on different timelines, and neither response is finished the same way.
What a residential proxy actually does
A residential proxy SDK lets a third party route its own web traffic through your TV's internet connection, so that traffic looks to any website like it is coming from an ordinary home. Spur's report names Bright Data's SDK, under variants including "Bright SDK", in 367 of the flagged apps, plus a smaller number carrying Oxylabs' Honeygain. The app does not need to be open for this to run — it works in the background as long as the proxy component is installed, and nothing on the screen tells you it is happening.
LG says it is done
LG confirmed to Krebs on Security in July that it would suspend any app enrolling its TVs in a residential proxy network, with a spokesperson stating plainly that "a residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs." By September 15, after roughly two months of going through its store, LG says that removal process was complete. That is LG's own account of its own cleanup, not an outside audit of the result.
Samsung is still working through it
Samsung's response started later and moved slower. In August, the company restricted new app submissions carrying proxy functionality and adopted a platform-wide policy banning residential proxy SDKs going forward. For apps already in its store, Samsung's own statement says it is "working to identify and remove all apps currently available" — an ongoing process, not a finished one, as of the most recent reporting on September 18.
What neither company has said
Removing an app from a store keeps new people from installing it. Neither company's public statement says whether that removal also strips the app from a television that already has it, or whether an app pulled from the store keeps running its proxy code on sets where it was installed before the ban. That gap matters more than either announcement, and until one of the two companies addresses it directly, the honest answer is that nobody outside LG and Samsung knows.
What to actually check
Open your TV's installed-apps list and look for anything you do not remember installing or have not opened in months — free apps promising an unusually large library of pirated or obscure content are the pattern researchers flagged most often. Uninstalling something you do not use costs nothing and closes the door regardless of which store review the app has or has not survived. And this is not limited to LG and Samsung: Krebs' reporting notes the same Bright Data SDK turning up in free apps on Roku, Comcast and Sky platforms, so a TV from neither brand is not automatically clear.
None of this is about which panel looks better in your living room — it is about what a television's software does when nobody is watching the screen. If the picture itself is what you are shopping on, what Samsung's Micro RGB sets actually change and what LG is doing with an RGB backlight on the MRGB95 are about the hardware, not the app store sitting on top of it.
Last updated September 24, 2026