Do you have a Samsung Galaxy? Attention, because it has been discovered a bug that sends your personal photos to contacts in the phone book, randomly and without warning.
This news is rather alarming: the photos saved in the roll can be very private and contain sensitive data, and no one would ever want them to be spread without their consent.
So far there have been several bug reports, which seems to be generated by Samsung Messages, which, after the last update, has started sending photos (often all those stored in memory) to other contacts. The Samsung models affected are above all Galaxy S9, S9 + and Galaxy Note 8, and the problem seems to occur especially during the night.
In addition, in many cases, the contacts that were closest to the affected user, such as the partner, were received as images.
Samsung Galaxy Bug: what’s going on
The scariest part of this bug regards the no notification of sending: the application Samsung Messages does not seem to leave any clue and the interested parties have discovered the incident only after being warned by those who received the photos. The news has spread thanks to reports on the support page of the Korean brand and Reddit, where users are also trying to figure out what exactly is generating these forced forwardings.
The predominant theory suggests the presence of a problem in the interaction between the Samsung app and the latest RCS update. This, which stands for Rich Communication Services, has been implemented to allow greater ease in sharing files.
Samsung has stated that it is aware of the reports and that their “technical team is dealing with them”.
How to solve the problem
Waiting for more news from Samsung, there are two methods that allow users more concerned about not running into this bug.
The first is to go through the settings of the App and temporarily remove the possibility to Samsung Messages to access the memory of the device. The application can no longer draw on the data saved on the phone and the automatic sending will be averted, but you can not send the files even voluntarily. You will then need to use other methods for sharing.
The second option is to set another SMS sending app as default, such as Android Messages, where the bug has not yet been reported. This and many others are available for free on Google Play and require only a few steps to use.
All settings can be restored as soon as the problem is solved, which is hoped to happen very quickly, before the number of messages increases further.