In a nutshell: Samsung is testing out a brand-new function called “repair mode” in South Korea. As the name implies, it’s a special feature that you may activate to shield your data from eavesdropping repairmen when you take your phone in for service.
Now that Samsung has brought it up, it seems strange to state that we give our phones, which contain all of their sensitive data, to repair facilities along with the password written down on a piece of paper.
Even though many small repairs don’t necessitate unlocking the phone, those that do pose a serious security risk if you have sensitive data on your phone, especially if you use it for work.
Repair personnel have been discovered abusing their access to customers’ phones (or PCs before that) in numerous reported cases.
Two workers at Pegatron, one of Apple’s primary repair providers, discovered pornographic photographs of a college student on her phone in 2016 and shared them on her Facebook page.
She sued Apple for $5 million and ultimately reached a confidential settlement for a large quantity of money, which was later covered by Pegatron. After that, Apple carried out a “exhaustive examination.”
Samsung’s repair mode is designed to stop scenarios like this from occurring. The phone turns into a blank canvas in this mode; all of your photographs, messages, and accounts vanish, leaving only the pre-installed apps visible.
It permits specialists to test all standard phone features, such as capturing a picture to verify that the camera has been fixed, but confines them in a secure area. According to Ars Technica, the mode allegedly operates by setting up a fresh, temporary user account inside a separate drive partition.
Repair mode will be included in an upcoming update for the S21 series’ South Korean variant, according to Samsung, with support for additional devices to follow.
When it becomes available, the option will be under Settings > Battery and Device Care > Repair Mode. You’ll be taken to the blank account, which doesn’t require a password, and the phone will restart.
Simply restart your phone once again, unlock it as usual, and it will be back to normal after you’ve disabled it.
We’d want to see a repair mode standard on more devices given how handy it seems. It might eventually become a standard feature of Android, but that won’t happen until Samsung completes testing and makes it available to the general public for the more recent S22 series as well as worldwide. There is no information on when it will occur, but hopefully not too soon.
