A bug in Samsung's default SMS application sends random photos to other people



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Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

Sending photos to others is one of the most basic functions of a smartphone, but when texting your application phone starts to expel photos without your knowledge, you have a problem.

And unfortunately, according to a handful of complaints about Reddit and the official Samsung forums, it seems like it's exactly what happened to a handful of Samsung phone users, including the owners of recent models like the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9.

According to user reports, the problem comes from Samsung Messages, the default email application on Galaxy devices, which (for undetermined reasons) mistakenly sends images stored on devices to contacts random via SMS. A Reddit user even claims that instead of sending a photo, Samsung Messages sent his entire photo gallery to a contact in the middle of the night.

Fortunately for this person (or maybe not), these photos were sent to their partner. But for others who may have photos sent to more sensitive recipients like a business partner or boss, the bug could give others an undesirable eye in their privacy .

The scariest part of this bug is that when Samsung Messages sends pictures to other people, it leaves no trace, which means that people do not know that their pictures were released in the nature until it is too late.

Currently, the dominant theory as to the cause of this bug is a weird interaction between Samsung Messages and recent RCS profile updates that have been deployed on operators such as T-Mobile. The goal of RCS (Rich Communication Services) is to improve the obsolete SMS protocol with new features like better media sharing, typing indicators, and read receipts. The problem right now is that it seems that something about how RCS is handled in Samsung Messages is all messing around.

Asked for comments, Samsung sent a statement to Mr. Gizmodo: "We are aware of the reports on this subject and our technical teams are studying the matter and the customers concerned are encouraged to contact us directly at 1-800-SAMSUNG. . "We also contacted T-Mobile, who responded by referring users to Samsung, saying," This is not a T-Mobile problem. "

Meanwhile, for the owners of Samsung worried that their phone could send sensitive photos to random contacts, there are currently two main fixes to this.The first is to access the settings of your phone's app and revoke the ability of Samsung Messages to access Until a real solution is released, it will prevent Messages from sending photos or anything else stored on your device, whatever you want. whether or not.

The other option is to switch to a different texting application like Android Messages or Textra, which does not seem affected by anything that plagues Samsung's SMS application (up to ############################################################################# 39, now). We hope that this problem will be resolved quickly, because until now, there is no guarantee of privacy for people using the Samsung SMS application.

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