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With advances in mobile photography, we're all taking more photos than ever before. A lot of those photos are meant to be shared, only you lot traditionally desire to choose which photos are shared. Some owners of Samsung phones say their devices have started spontaneously sending their photos to a random contact. That sounds like a pretty serious problem. Non as serious as exploding phones, only most.

Users claim the issue stems from Samsung Letters, which is the default SMS app on all of Samsung'due south phones. Affected individuals say their phones have started sending messages to one of their contacts with their total photo gallery. This message doesn't show up on their end, but the other person'due south phone shows the message every bit if it was sent manually. One Samsung user also reports that T-Mobile'due south logs showed the message sent from his phone.

That person was lucky that the photos were shared with his meaning other rather than an acquaintance or concern acquaintance. The lack of any evidence on the afflicted phone may exist the scariest office — this could be happening much more than than we recall because the recipient is someone the involuntary sender doesn't speak to often.

Reports of the issue have appeared on Reddit and on Samsung's official forums involving devices like the Note eight and Galaxy S9. The crusade and calibration of the trouble are all speculation at this indicate, but something appears to be happening. Samsung says it has teams investigating events.

An example of RCS features.

Some users are pointing the finger at a buggy update for Samsung'southward Messages app, which happens automatically via the Galaxy Apps shop. That would be a astringent bug to introduce in an update, though. This app is as well at the center of Samsung'south RCS messaging push, so that might have something to practice with the phantom messages. RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the next phase of carrier messaging. RCS adds features that traditional SMS lacks similar read receipts, more than characters, seamless grouping chats, and more. RCS has merely started rolling out on carriers like T-Mobile, and Samsung's Letters app is i of the first to get back up. Samsung even has its own RCS hub that carriers tin apply to serve upwardly RCS messages. It'south possible the unauthorized messages are related.

If y'all're using a Samsung telephone and are concerned about this bug, a smart course of action would be to make sure your photos are backed up to a service similar Google Photos or Dropbox. So, delete the local copies. Your phone can't share what it doesn't have. Yous can also place whatsoever "sensitive" photos in the phone'south Secure Binder, which is encrypted and split up from the primary OS.