New Samsung Secure Folder Flaw Means Your Photos Aren’t So Secure After All, But Here’s The Fix

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

Samsung’s Secure Folder promises to be an encrypted space on your Galaxy smartphone where you can store files, images, and more away from prying eyes. Its whole premise is to keep files private and avoid surfacing them if anyone else uses your device by chance. However, Secure Folder isn’t as secure as Samsung promises it to be. We’ve already found one flaw in Secure Folder that lets anyone see which apps and photos you have stored within. Now, there’s another Secure Folder flaw.

Sammobile found that the Gallery app inside Secure Folder in One UI 7 can make its contents visible outside of Secure Folder through auto-generated stories. Firstly, the Gallery app inside Secure Folder can automatically create stories from your photos and videos, which sends out a notification to your system outside of the Secure Folder. What makes the flaw worse is that tapping on the notification will reveal all its content, even outside the Secure Folder.

If you have media stored in Secure Folder, it’s in your best interest to turn off auto-generating stories within Secure Folder’s Gallery app. Open the Secure Folder’s Gallery app, go to Menu > Settings, and turn off Auto create stories. Note that this feature is said to be turned on by default, so if you’ve never played around with this setting before, you should toggle it off and double-check that it is off.

This reason is speculatively said to be one of the reasons why the One UI 7 rollout has been pulled. Samsung remains mum, as has been the trend throughout most of the rollout.

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