Samsung had already introduced Privacy Display with the Galaxy S26 Ultra — a feature meant to make it harder for someone standing beside you to peek at your screen from an angle. Now, with the fourth One UI 9 beta released last week, the company has decided this feature needed to go a step further.
What’s Actually New Here
This update brings picture-in-picture video support to Privacy Display. In simple terms — if you’re watching a video in PiP mode with Privacy Display switched on, only that small floating window gets obscured from side-angle viewing, while the rest of your screen stays visible as normal to anyone glancing over.
Tipster Ice Universe has shared a video demonstrating exactly how this works.
It’s a fairly narrow use case, but a telling one it suggests Samsung is thinking less about “privacy” as one blanket setting, and more about privacy as something applied selectively, window by window, feature by feature.
The Small Print That Matters
According to a post on Samsung’s Community forums, this PiP Privacy Display will keep working even if you drag the PiP window to a different spot on the screen. The system is also designed to detect other elements, like the Edge Panel, so the obscured PiP window doesn’t end up covering them by mistake.
Here’s the catch worth knowing before anyone gets excited — this doesn’t just switch on automatically. If you’re running One UI 9 beta on a Galaxy S26 Ultra, you’ll need to enable Privacy Display separately for each app where you want PiP protection. And there’s a stranger condition attached — Privacy Display cannot be turned on for the entire screen at once, or this PiP-specific version simply stops working.
Which brings up a fair question — when a “privacy” feature comes with this many conditions attached, how many people will actually go through the trouble of setting it up the right way, versus how many will just assume it’s already working?
