Samsung phones are spontaneously texting users’ photos to random contacts without their permission

Lousy news for Samsung mobile phone house owners: some devices are randomly sending your digicam roll images to your contacts without authorization. As initial spotted by Android Central and afterwards covered by Gizmodo, customers are complaining about the problem on Reddit and the company’s official community forums.

One consumer states his cell phone sent all his photographs to his girlfriend. The messages are currently being despatched by Samsung’s default texting app Samsung Messages. In accordance to experiences, the Messages application does not even show people that data files have been despatched a lot of just find out immediately after they get a response from the recipient of the random pictures sent to them.

A Samsung spokesperson tells The Verge it’s “aware of the reports” and that its technical groups are “looking into it.” The discussion boards indicate that Galaxy S9 and S9+ devices are influenced, but may perhaps not be the only kinds afflicted with the bug. Samsung is encouraging all those suffering from this challenge to call the organization directly at 1-800-SAMSUNG.

Some end users are speculating that this challenge has to do with the force of RCS messaging updates, which includes T-Cellular, which is the carrier for at minimum a single of the affected phones. T-Cellular just issued its RCS update this week, setting up with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. The messaging standard is meant to make texting look a lot more like chatting in a fashionable messaging application, comprehensive with browse receipts and typing indicators. When arrived at for remark, a T-Cell spokesperson explained to The Verge to “check in with Samsung on this, it is not a T-Cellular concern.”

For now, Samsung house owners can revoke Samsung Message’s permissions to accessibility storage to prevent the bug from sending their documents out in the wild.

Update 7/2, 5:08 PM ET: This write-up to begin with mentioned that photographs were being sent more than SMS, but it’s unclear how the images are staying sent. It’s additional very likely MMS messages or SMS with a hyperlink. We have also updated the story with a remark from T-Cellular.