Samsung’s got a new feature to prevent phones from having their data stolen while under repair
When you send your phone to a shop to get it repaired, you are more or less trusting that the person doing the repair won’t go through your personal data or make off with your phone. Unfortunately, as we have seen over the years, there are unscrupulous individuals who have no qualms about stealing your data and then leaking it onto the internet and blackmailing you for money.
The good news is that as far Samsung’s phones are concerned, they are introducing a new feature called Repair Mode that’s designed to prevent that from happening. Basically what happens is that when you put your phone into Repair Mode, everything including your personal data is locked away and that the repair person can only access the phone’s default apps.
This means that users won’t have to worry about the repair person nosing around their phone and looking through their personal data. To exit repair mode, users will need to reboot the device and reauthenticate themselves either through a fingerprint scan or pattern recognition.
This actually sounds like a pretty useful feature and according to Samsung, it will be arriving to the Galaxy S21 series first before expanding to more models. As this announcement was made in South Korea, it is expected to be made available there first before it finds its way to other regions.
Source: SamMobile