In a word: Samsung is experimenting with a new feature in South Korea called “repair mode”. As the name suggests, this is a special setting you can turn on when you bring your phone in for repairs that protects your data from nosy repair technicians.
Now that Samsung has pointed this out, it seems strange to say that we hand over our phones, with all of their sensitive data on board, to repair shops with the password on a piece of paper. Many minor repairs don’t require unlocking the phone, but those that do pose a significant security risk if you have important information on your phone, especially if you use it for work.
There have been numerous documented cases of repair technicians abusing their access to customer phones (or PCs before that) and getting caught. In 2016, two employees of Pegatron, one of Apple’s main repairers, found explicit images of a female student on her phone and posted them on her Facebook account. She sued Apple for $5 million and privately settled a multimillion-dollar sum, which was ultimately paid by Pegatron. Apple conducted a “thorough investigation” followingwards.
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Samsung’s Repair Mode is intended to prevent similar situations from occurring. In the mode, the phone becomes a blank canvas: your photos, messages and accounts all disappear and only the default applications remain visible. It allows technicians to try out all normal phone functions, like taking a photo to see if the camera was repaired successfully, but keeps them in an isolated environment. Ars-Technica speculate mode works by creating a new temporary user account in a different disk partition.
Samsung says Repair Mode will be added in an upcoming update for the South Korean version of the S21 series, with more devices to follow. When the feature arrives, you can find it in Settings > Battery and device care > Repair mode. This will restart the phone and take you to the empty account, which does not require a password. To turn it off, all you have to do is restart your phone, unlock it the usual way, and it will be back to normal.
Given how useful this sounds, we’d like to see a repair mode become a standard feature on more devices. This might eventually become a default Android feature, but before that happens Samsung needs to complete testing and release it to the public for the new S22 series as well as internationally. No word on when that will be, but hopefully in the not too distant future.
Image credit: Shri
