Imagine a company mining its own user’s data from their smartphones and serving them targeted ads directly to the devices it mined the data from. Sound familiar? But what if the company which made the smartphones was the same one mining their own customer’s data to sneak them relevant adverts. Annoying? Yes. Breach of privacy? Perhaps. Well, apparently Samsung has set in motion a plan to do exactly that.
The Korean giant will be pushing its own ads on its own phones as evident by a new trademark titled ‘Samsung Mobile Ads’ which Samsung registered earlier this week. And as per its description, Samsung will be serving up ‘interest-based ads’ to its phones and tablets. Simply put, they’ll be spamming your phones with targeted ads. These ads have been spotted on a couple of Samsung’s flagship devices already, namely: Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy S10.
It is using bloatware, including Bixby, Samsung Pay, and Push service to show adverts as pop-up notifications. That being said, Samsung hasn’t released an official statement confirming this mobile advertising strategy.
If implemented, Samsung phones would start showing banners and push notifications in the notification shade promoting their own products, multiple times every day. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. A couple of smartphone brands have already given this a try including Apple, HTC, and Xiaomi.
HTC pushed adverts for movies on its smartphones back in 2015. Apple has also used its own OS to sneak in ads for its music service on the notification menu. Note that Xiaomi’s MIUI has pre-installed services that show ads throughout the UI. A good example would be the instance when Xiaomi started including ads in the settings menu. Samsung has also attempted something similar in the recent past when it started serving UI-based notification ads promoting Samsung Galaxy S6+ and Samsung Galaxy S9.