This notification comes from an app that is designed to tell a remote user where you are located. That was enough to spook me.
I dismissed the notification, deleted as much data from Samsung apps as possible, and turned my phone off.
Rough moment to be a Samsung executive. They're just about the only top smartphone manufacturer that doesn't manufacture the vast majority of their handsets in China so presumably they are in position to take some market share from the competition. Yet today we are seeing some fear about contagion in SK, and this very strange notification that -- benign or not -- is going to scare some users (e.g. me). I for one would like to see a formal statement made to the public.
This spooked me as well. I never used any of the Samsung apps on my phone and never created the Samsung account. Since apps come pre-installed, it was in the back of my head that Samsung could access the data anyway, but I dismissed it as company suicide to do something like this.
Since so many people received notification, it could be that some "Samsung God mode" exists.
However, Samsung represents approximately a third of the world's smartphone market, while LG is something like 3% -- tagging along behind Samsung, Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi, and Oppo.
I don't know the best way to handle customer worries after sth like this, but I'm sure "a samsung care ambassador replied on page 22" is not the best way.
At the very least, ensure that a google/bing/ddg/... search ends up in that thread, where a pinned note explains it.
From a Samsung Care Abassador on page 22 of comments:
> Hey everyone,
> From what I can tell, this is a some test on Samsung's end to assure services are working. U expect Samsung will make an official statement explaining but I want to mention it now to hopefully put some of you at ease.
Linux phones can't come soon enough. I don't need many features, I just need calls, texts, a web browser, and an SSH utility. I'm willing to give up a lot of features just to have control over my phone.
Is it too much to ask for me to have exclusive control over my devices?
I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of those unpaid / volunteer things -- you know, where the company allows one to provide free support to other customers for, um, the "prestige" or "recognition" or something. Dell used to do that with their forums and such, not sure if they still do.
Kinda like how years ago [0] folks who wanted you to design a web site for them for free would try to bullshit you into believing that "the exposure" would be worth waaaaaaay more than any money that they might pay you.
---
[0]: I'm assuming enough people finally said "FYPM" that this doesn't happen so much anymore but I would not be shocked to find out I'm wrong.
This also freaked me out in the morning. Right after that, I randomly heard about Google accusing Samsung of increasing the attack vector on their phones [1].
1 (number one) is popular in "injection" attacks as it is likely to go through and not throw an error. If you login as admin to your web based control panel and is greeted with an alert(1) you know you are fucked.
Almost certainly the former. Careful people need to be in charge and keep a tight leash on people who are careless until they are careful.
Also pre-emptive response to “something something about systems something cgpgrey”. At the end of the day we live in the real world with imperfections everywhere. Every system eventually boils down to trust in humans.
Samsung phones have only gotten worse over the years with the additional bloatware that they preinstall on phones. All Android phones get 'Find my Device' which is a service provided by google which works well. There is no reason for Samsung to install an app which can remotely track location data on it's phones and send data to it's own servers.
Another prime example of it is the preinstalled bloatware 'Samsung pay mini' that they bundle with all phones. My phone has samsung pay mini installed and I cannot remove or uninstall it. It is a persistent and annoying bar which sits at the bottom of my launcher screen so it's always visible. Force stopping it only makes it restart in a few minutes. I am never buying a Samsung again
There actually is a reason for find my Samsung. It works better than Google's find my Android [1].
The pay mini thing can also be disabled from within the Samsung pay settings [2].
I'm not an Android dev, but isn't it nothing about privacy or remote control (apart from sending the notification) contrary to the reactions in the comments?
AFAIK, Android/iOS push notifications works quite independently from the app itself. Even if the app is not running in the background the app server can send a message to Google/Apple (not to Samsung) and Google/Apple send the message to the device to show the message. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Just noticed the notification today morning and was wondering which bloatware app I missed when uninstalling them all and accidentally bricking the device couple of times. Meantime I'm still not able to set up properly the notifications for WhatsApp, RSS client, and email client to let me know when email/message/call is arriving, just random notification sounds and no clue what happened and where... all I know is that "the phone needs attention". Bring back the 3.5mm audio jack to the iPhone and I'm buying it instantly.
These companies have an insane amount of control, power and insight into our lifes via our telephones. When we see but a sliver of said power, we freak out.
At least LineageOS's notification (2018) that they were going to use your phone to mine some custom crypto currency turned out to be a joke and not an error :) [0] Also freaked me out btw.
As someone who was once "all Samsung", Samsung are really bad at software. Their apps crashed all the time, their websites frequently errored out, they managed to make using Android painful, SmartThings is a fiasco etc.
I wouldn't trust them with any of my personal data.
While remote tracking, bricking, etc is very useful, I do not trust any company to make it secure enough, so the features becomes moot. It would be better if I could create a encryption key myself to be sure that only I had access to those features.
Last year some time I got about half a dozen ‘test message’ notifications from a ride share app in the middle of the night. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make.
I got the '1' on one of my Samsung Galaxys before I saw this. I tried using FMP from another device on the same Samsung account. I got separate notifications regarding that it reported my location and reported nearby WiFi servers it could find.
I am thinking of buying a new android device, but it seems all manufacturers include loads of bloatware. Is there any manufacturer apart from Google who offer lean android devices?
If you are technical, the debloating process isn't so bad. You enable debug mode, hook your phone to PC, and run a bunch of "adb pm remove" commands. (Google for "xda S10 debloat".) I was able to remove pre-installed Bixby, Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung apps, etc.
If you're not technical, its a fucking shame that you end up with a phone with loads of pre-loaded stuff.
I think any AndroidOne phone should. A major issue for me is that there is almost no Android phone that is not quite bad. I had a Nokia 7 Plus which ran AnroidOne and it was probably one of the worst phones I ever had. I bought a Samsung afterwards because the Nokia was not usable and while the Samsung was also quite horrible it was at least usable. Motorola also offers the Motorola One Vision but I can't vouch for their quality and I would guess it is also rather bad.
What were your issues with the Nokia? I've had mine sitting around for several months now with a broken charging port, a persistent smudge down the left side of the screen and it likes to restart when fast charging.
Other than that, it was a great budget phone. For now, I'm using the Motorola One Vision and have found it to be great for the price too.
You know what... I hated the iPhone since the 3G when an update made it so slow to be unusable. Android all the way since. But then I got tired of having to install third party ROMs that vary a lot in quality, crash often, aren't updated anymore... So I bought a used 6S for 150$. Absolutely no regrets. It just works. It's not slow even on the latest iOS. It'll be hard to make me switch back to Android again. Maybe worth considering?
Their ruggedized Android phones aren't bad.
I even took almost all the Google stuff off of mine and use F-Droid. About the only thing they stick you with that you can't delete is App Toolbox, which is an app store for useful things like bulldozer rental and excavation calculations.
Let me take that back. The nonremovable battery has started to bulge and the case back has bent by 2mm. I'm currently trying to find out how to ship HAZMAT back for repair.
A Nokia with Android One certainly has less bloatware than most cheap phones, but you WILL still get pestered by Google Assistant incessantly. There's no way to turn it off. No matter how many settings you disable, it will always pop up when it thinks you've said 'ok google', and sometimes sporadically.
I never ever created an account with Samsung. Can I still ask for all their collected data under GDPR for my phone ID (MAC address, IMEI)? I'm guessing something in that phone is probably calling home, right?
I dismissed the notification, deleted as much data from Samsung apps as possible, and turned my phone off.
Rough moment to be a Samsung executive. They're just about the only top smartphone manufacturer that doesn't manufacture the vast majority of their handsets in China so presumably they are in position to take some market share from the competition. Yet today we are seeing some fear about contagion in SK, and this very strange notification that -- benign or not -- is going to scare some users (e.g. me). I for one would like to see a formal statement made to the public.