Samsung Launches New “Privacy Display” to Protect Your Screen

Samsung recently made the new Galaxy S26 series available for pre-order, which features a huge privacy improvement never seen before on a phone: a builtin, toggleable privacy screen that functions on a per-pixel level.

If you’re not familiar with privacy screens, they essentially restrict your viewing angle to be very narrow so that anyone not viewing the screen directly head-on will just see a black screen, protecting the contents of your screen such as passwords, photos, sensitive texts, etc from onlookers.

The downsides of privacy screens make then nonviable for acct people though. Since they inherently restrict light due to how they function, they cause the screen overall to be dimmer than it would be without it. Since they’re stuck on top of the screen, they can’t be easily removed, so when you want to show someone something on your screen, it becomes quite annoying.

Generally, display manufacturers have been trying to increase the viewing angle because that’s viewed as desirable for most people, and it is. The point of a screen after all is to show things to people.

However, now with Samsung’s new display technology they term the “Privacy Display,” you can toggle the privacy screen effect on or off whenever you want.

The tech works on the pixel level. Using a combination of “narrow” pixels That restrict the angle light is allowed to escape, and regular pixels, they can disable the regular pixels for specific areas of the screen, such as a password field, while leaving the rest of the screen unaffected.

Since the ”narrow” pixels are surrounded on all sides, the viewing angle restriction applies in the top and bottom of the screen and not just the sides, so someone above you looking down also won’t be able to see your screen.

You can enable the privacy screen for specific apps that require more security, such as a banking app or a messenger, as well as enabling it just for password fields and notifications. You can even enable it with a quick double press of the side button so you can quickly enable it in public places.

In an age when shoulder surfing is a major threat to phone users, this technology will genuinely prevent countless people’s data from being stolen.

Samsung manufactures the displays for other companies such as Apple, so it’s possible we might see the technology in more devices in the future. Interestingly, Apple had filed a patent for similar tech back in 2023. It’s more than likely that if Samsung allows it, it’ll end up in many more phones in the future.

This isn’t the first attempt at a built-in, toggleable privacy screen. Lenovo has had a similar feature in their devices, however it only allows you to toggle the entire screen on or off, it doesn’t work on a per-pixel level like Samsung’s version. There’s been complaints that it’s not very effective and it dims the screen too much.

Currently, the Privacy Display is only available on the flagship Galaxy S26 Ultra, but like most technology, I think we can expect it to be available on cheaper devices in the future.