[josalhor]

People use their phone today to: Manage 100k+,1M+ bank accounts, 2FA, secret messaging, sensitive media, medication, credentials and more. This privacy feature makes a lot of sense. Give it a couple of iterations and I think this will be the standard in business. It never made sense to me the trust that we put on no one looking at the contents of a display at the same time as us.

[idle_zealot]

I'm much less concerned about a rando looking over my shoulder than I am the wealth of information the software hands out to its owners. It's like the difference between being seen in public by other pedestrians versus being captured by thousands of fixed surveillance cameras. Look all you want, so long as you're not wired into a database. Different threat models, I guess.

[close04]

The people who are genuinely concerned about shoulder surfing probably slapped on a privacy filter anyway. They're no different from a screen protector. What the S26 Ultra can do is cool and super useful for the few people who need it, but I'd bet that all the rest will just show it off as a cool party trick and nothing more.

I've seen this with laptops that came with integrated electronically controlled privacy filter. They were nice but eventually the added cost, complexity, and lowered image quality didn't make them a popular choice even for enterprise users. I think only HP still offers them from the big brands, Dell and Lenovo don't do it anymore.

[throwaway270925]

> The people who are genuinely concerned about shoulder surfing probably slapped on a privacy filter anyway.

So only the people concerned about it should get privacy?

> They're no different from a screen protector.

Privacy filters are way worse than screen protectors, they permanently degrade your display experience by a LOT, and you cant turn them off when you dont need them.

> I've seen this with laptops that came with integrated electronically controlled privacy filter.

Which are a completely different thing than this privacy display.

> lowered image quality

Exactly, these addon filters or layers degrade image quality, this new display doesnt. In normal mode its just a normal 2600 nits, HDR, 120hz, and whatnot OLED smartphone display.

[close04]

> So only the people concerned about it should get privacy?

To call this an uncharitable interpretation would be an understatement. The phone has a feature that costs money and if you look around you’ll see most people don’t bother with this concern.

It has nothing to do with “should”. I have the same privacy now and for way less than the price of that phone. The solution for privacy exists already and the one Samsung offers was already “rejected” in the past because of the added cost most likely. Why do you think it comes on one of the most expensive phones on the market?

> these addon filters or layers degrade image quality

You didn’t read my comment carefully. I wrote specifically about integrated electronically controlled privacy filters on screen laptops which lowered image quality.

A phone at this price level already targets a tiny niche just because of affordability. A small part of that niche buys the phone because they want the privacy screen.

[observationist]

Or displaying your card out in the open, flashing it in front of everyone in the restaurant, grocery store, etc. With remote workers scanning through video feeds of people in public, it won't be long before they figure out the Meta glasses and similar cameras are high enough resolution to capture sensitive information, even if the actual user is 100% innocent and not doing anything wrong.

There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.

Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.

Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.

The world is so ridiculously insecure.

[LtWorf]

My card has 2fa. I can display it but it won't work to pay unless I stick it into a reader, type my PIN and copy a code.