With stories about hackers selling personal information in bulk becoming more common every day, sending your smartphone to be repaired can be stressful. Of course you can erase the data on your phone, but you’ll have to bother to restore it again later. Fortunately, Samsung is introducing a new function called “Repair Mode” as a solution for this problem.
According to a Korean announcement first spotted by SamMobile, you can enable the new mode under “Battery & Device Maintenance” in Settings. Samsung didn’t reveal the technology behind the feature but said it will hide your personal information, photos, messages and linked accounts when enabled. Technicians can only see the device’s pre-installed apps. To regain access to your data, simply disable Repair Mode and draw a pattern or use fingerprint recognition to verify your identity.
Considering that Samsung has yet to announce this feature outside of Korea, we can only guess that it’s only available in the company’s home country at the moment. Also, it seems to be only available on Galaxy S21 series phones for now. However, the company says it will roll out Repair Mode to other models and possibly other regions in the future.
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