Samsung Reveals 56% of People Peek at Phone Screens, Galaxy S26 Ultra Features Privacy Display

JAKARTA - Samsung revealed a fact that is quite "relatable but makes you suspicious": more than half of smartphone users have ever peeked at other people's phone screens in public places. This finding prompted the technology giant to introduce new hardware-based features on the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra to protect user privacy.

Based on Samsung's survey in Europe, as many as 56% of respondents admitted to accidentally looking at someone else's phone screen. More interesting, 24% admitted to doing it on purpose - just out of curiosity.

Public transportation is the most "crowded" location, with 57% of respondents naming places such as trains or buses as the main point of this violation of visual privacy.

"This data shows that the threat of privacy is not always coming from remote hackers, but also from the user's surrounding environment," said Samsung's internal analysis.

The content that is visible is not always trivial. Around 38% of respondents admitted to seeing other people's personal photos, 32% watched video calls, 29% read private messages, and even 11% admitted to seeing banking information.

Ironically, only 21% of respondents actually believe that using a mobile phone in public is a private activity. The majority seems to have "accepted" that their screens can be public consumption. When they feel spied on, 42% choose to hide the screen, while only 10% dare to reprimand the perpetrator.

Answering this phenomenon, Samsung introduced the Privacy Display feature on the Galaxy S26 Ultra. This technology allows the screen to be dark and unreadable from the side, so only users who see it directly from the front can access the content.

Unlike conventional privacy screen protectors that are permanent, this feature can be enabled and disabled as needed - giving users more flexibility.

However, this feature is currently exclusive to the Galaxy S26 Ultra because its implementation is at the hardware level, so it cannot be presented on previous models such as the Galaxy S25 Ultra and other Galaxy S26 variants.

Follow VOI Whatsapp Channel