- A privacy notice is appearing on some Samsung TVs every few hours
- It doesn't seem to be possible to fully disable from the TV
- But it might be possible if you log into Samsung's website
Do you have a Samsung TV whose pop-up won't stop? You might not be the only one. Samsung owners have been emailing us and posting on forums about one particularly persistent pop-up message that keeps on popping up – but the good news is that there may be a simple solution.
The message is about Samsung's privacy policy collecting user data, and many Samsung owners will have seen it; I'm one of them – though mine never came back after the first showing. But for some users the pop-up keeps returning; one of the affected owners told us that it pops up every few hours, which tracks with what people are saying online. But no one seems to be able to find an option on the TVs to disable it.
The particular customer who contacted us also contacted Samsung support, and was told by a rep that there wasn't a fix. But other Samsung owners beg to differ.
How to fix the Samsung privacy pop-up problem
The issue doesn't appear to be affecting huge numbers of people, which is perhaps why the Samsung support rep didn't know how to get rid of it. But it's clearly affecting some people across multiple models – we're aware of the issue happening on the Samsung S90C and QN90B – in certain countries, including the US, and they've been posting to sites such as Reddit and to the Samsung community website. And it's that latter site where we might have found the solution.
One pop-up-plagued poster said they got rid of the message by logging into their Samsung account on the company's website, and clicked on the privacy updates. "That stopped the notice from appearing on my TV," they say.
If that's not working for you, there's something else to try in the short term: this post on the Samsung community site talks about how annoying the message is: "For the past 2 days, I've been getting an EXTREMELY annoying popup notification with small ding sound. This pops up about every 2 hours and disappears in 5 seconds."
Their fix wasn't ideal, but it did seem to work: by blocking internet access from the TV so that it has local network access but not wide area network access, the pop-up stops appearing. But that's only convenient if you use a streaming device such as a Chromecast or Apple TV 4K to deliver things to your TV; if you're using the built-in smart apps, then of course they need to be online.
Based the fact that this appeared on my TV and disappeared forever, it looks very much like a software update gremlin has got this message stuck on a loop rather than finding its way into the ether once shown.
We contacted Samsung, which said it was looking into the problem on our reader's behalf, but wasn't able to provide more information by the time of publication. We'll update this story with official info as we get it.
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