Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
On January 6th, a post appeared on Reddit’s largest Android forum with alarming news: “Chinese spyware pre-installed on all Samsung phones.”
“I know the title is rather sensational,” the author explained, “however it couldn’t get any closer to the truth.”
The problem was a utility in Samsung’s Device Care application, a mandatory feature that comes preinstalled as part of Samsung’s Android implementation that cannot be removed. Using packet analysis tools on a Galaxy S10, the author discovered some strange traffic coming out of Device Care’s storage scanner, which looks for junk files that can be deleted to free up space. That scanner was sending data back to Chinese domains — and because storage scanners generally need access to all of…