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One of the significant areas where a mobile user’s private photos, messages, and videos get leaked is from repair shops. While the chances of this happening at an authorized service center are minimal, there have been enough bad apples to make people wary of handing their devices over. How we deal with data security and privacy has become a joke.
Samsung seems to understand this and has therefore developed a new feature that lets users keep all their private information like messages, email, photos, and videos safe. Samsung is experimenting with a new feature in South Korea called “repair mode.”
As the name suggests, it’s a unique setting that you can toggle on when you take your phone in for repairs that protects your data from repair technicians and other people at service centers and repair shops.
In this new Repaid Mode, the phone becomes a blank new phone: your photos, messages, and accounts all disappear, and only the default apps are accessible and shown. It lets technicians do all the necessary repairs and use all the usual phone functions, like taking a photo to see if the camera has been repaired successfully.
The original data is contained in an isolated environment. The new mode works by creating a new, temporary user account within a different drive partition, which gets deleted once the device has been repaired and delivered.
Samsung says Repair Mode will be enabled in specific devices through an upcoming update for the South Korean version of the S21 series, with more devices to follow. Slowly, they will be implementing the feature in other countries as well.
Users can find the update in Settings under the Battery and Device Care menu when the update arrives. This will restart the phone and take you to the blank account, which doesn’t require a password. To disable it, you continue your phone, unlock it the usual way, and it’ll return to normal.
On paper, this may seem a very tiny detail and an ancillary feature at best. However, this is a feature that most other smartphone manufacturers should start providing. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see it become a standard feature in Android and iOS in a few years.
