Samsung Phones Said to Come with Chinese "Spyware" Phoning Home
Samsung phones and tablets allegedly come with what is being described as "spyware" that communicates with Chinese servers regularly.
A reddit thread that has gone viral includes a closer look at a feature called Device Care and available on all Samsung phones and tablets.
As Samsung itself confirms, the "Storage" module of Device Care is "powered by 360," but no information is provided as to why it phones back home to China.
While Qihoo 360, the company that Samsung points to, has previously been involved in several privacy scandals that included hidden data collection, little is known about what's happening on phones and tablets developed by the South Korean manufacturer.
A fan of Samsung phones has discovered Chinese spyware which is installed by default by Samsung, can't be removed, and for which has been sending packets to Chinese addresses. The storage scanner in the Device Care section of Samsung phones is a mandatory software install protected by the system making it hard to remove. No comment has been made by Samsung about why it includes this spyware in its main line of mobile phones.
Do you packet sniff your phone to find out where it is sending your data?
(Score: 3, Informative) by arslan on Thursday January 09 2020, @02:07AM
Some interesting points summarized here for SN benefit:
The official statement is translated so maybe some meaning is lost in translation. It mentioned the phone only delegate file cleaning functions not security functions. This is a bit vague, does the file cleaning function phone home? if it does does it tag on extra data? Does it have admin privilege and do things beyond it's delegated function? None of these is answered by Samsung conclusively - so the response is a bit of a smoke screen. Of course understandably these questions won't really becoming from the non-tech savvy folks so the answers will only confuse them.
Some comments in reddit indicates that they don't actually see any traffic phoning home, but one particular commenter noted he/she have been monitoring it since the initial news broke and did see traffic but quickly stopped and have been silent since then. So hard to conclusively say it isn't phoning home if you just gone about setting up the network inspection.