Samsung says it isn’t seeing any software or hardware issues after a slew of Samsung phone users reported that their devices are randomly sending camera roll photos to their contacts without permission.
Users took to Reddit and Samsung’s official forums over the past week to complain that their smartphones were pushing out photos to random contacts without their knowledge. Samsung, for its part, told Threatpost it is still reviewing the situation – but hasn’t found any issues yet.
“Samsung has reviewed this matter thoroughly these past few days; however, there were no hardware or software issues found to be relevant to this particular case,” a Samsung spokesperson told Threatpost via email. “While there have been no known similar customer reports globally, we will continue to investigate this issue further.”
One user on Reddit claimed that their Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus sent an entire photo gallery but there was no record of it, and was only able to see a record of it on T-Mobile logs. Meanwhile, another user took to Samsung’s forum to allege “premature sending” on their Galaxy S9 smartphone.
The user said that the Samsung Messaging (Samsung’s default texting app on Galaxy devices) has become buggy and was sending pictures to random contacts.
Though no cause is known yet, the glitch appears to be prevalent in Galaxy devices for T-Mobile users with Samsung Messages and Rich Communication Services – an update for SMS that enables new features such as read receipts and enhanced media sharing.
The glitch allegedly causes scheduled messages to be sent prematurely or end up in the wrong threats, one user said on Samsung’s forum. “All of these errors are new since RCS Messaging was enabled and occurs with the SCHEDULED TEXT feature,” the user wrote on the forum. “I should clarify that the issue was present ever since purchasing the S9+ on 5/23. I have downloaded 2 software updates since then.”
In the meantime, Samsung users can avoid the glitch by going to their phones’ app settings and removing permissions for the Samsung Messages to access storage – meaning that photos will not be able to be shared by the messaging service at all.
“We encourage any customers who may have questions or concerns to contact their local Customer Service center,” said the Samsung spokesperson.
