Samsung includes controversial technology to ensure that all of the brand’s marketed televisions have been legitimately sold.
If your brand new Samsung TV gets deactivated remotely for some reason, it is likely that you bought it illegitimately.
And it is that the South Koreans of Samsung have announced that all their Smart TV televisions that are being commercialized have a feature called TV Block, which would allow them to be deactivated remotely if the manufacturer finds that they have been sold illegally on the market.
This has come as a response from the South Korean company itself to the riots in South Africa that caused large looting and many of them affecting warehouses and Samsung stores.
However, the company has been transparent about it, and in a press release has explained exactly what this new feature, TV Block, is called and what it is.
“TV Block is a remote security solution that detects if Samsung TV units have been improperly activated and ensures that TVs can only be used by legitimate owners with valid proof of purchase“says Samsung.
“The goal of the technology is to mitigate the creation of secondary markets linked to the sale of illegal goods, both in South Africa and beyond its borders. This technology is already preloaded in all Samsung TV products“, they add.
Basically Samsung wants to make sure that all of its televisions that have been marketed are being used by their rightful owners with valid proof of purchase.
Basically what Samsung would do is locate the serial numbers of those stolen televisions, and add them to a list on the company’s own servers. Once a stolen TV connects to the Internet, the device would be verified against that list of stolen devices on Samsung’s servers, and if there is a match it would disable all functions.
But this technology can bring many problems in this regard. The first errors, since no system is infallible, and some Samsung TV may crash by mistake. In that case, the customer would have to send the proof of purchase to Samsung, but what if they no longer have it?
On the other hand, if Samsung suffers some kind of security breach and cybercriminals accessed this technology or servers, it could happen that even all the televisions marketed by the South Korean company would be blocked by the attackers. It is a safety decision of certain ethical doubt, and that could even affect the second-hand market.