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This YouTube video is one of several showing that, if you open a Samsung mobile phone battery, it contains a "secret chip" and antenna, and suggests it can be used for transmitting your secret data to Samsung.

Is this true?

Oddthinking
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user27069
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1 Answers1

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This conspiracy theory has been widely debunked already. It is obviously false to anyone familiar with the Near Field Communication (NFC) antenna, installed on Samsung Galaxy batteries.

Here are some of the many sources that have quickly responded to these claims with explanations:

While there is a coil “hidden” in the wrapping surrounding most batteries included with Samsung phones, this is merely the NFC antenna and not a “secret microchip” used to steal data.

So please, don't try to pull the sticker off of your Samsung battery. Don't let anyone you know try it either, the risk for accidentally puncturing your battery is just too high. That chip is not harvesting your data in any way,

Inside your smartphone, hidden underneath the sticky plastic wrapping of the battery, or glued to the removable rear cover, there’s a secret, ominous-looking wireless chip. It’s not controlled by the FBI or the government or the Illuminati, though, and it’s not tracking every search you make online — it’s just NFC.

If you are a Pakistani and have received the above said video through your friends on social media, dont believe in the silly stuff the two gentlemen in the video are preaching and thereby destroy your NFC chip.

No it is not some super secret chip put there by Samsung to track your every move and steal all your videos and photos. It’s an important part of the phone that you’re tearing out and is probably a really dumb idea to do that. So you can rest easy Internet, your Samsung phones are not being controlled by Samsung and your data is just fine.

Basically, there's a video of some guy claiming the Samsung NFC sticker wrapped around his Galaxy S4's battery is a government or corporate surveillance device placed there to steal all your photos and monitor all your phone calls. It is completely, utterly false and also surprisingly bigoted (!), so please note that this video is probably best tagged NSFW for language / anti-Semitism.

The man peeled off this sticker on his phone’s battery claiming it is helping the company collect data on his his photos. What the sticker really holds is NFC technology, which allows users to do a variety of cool things, like mobile payments for example.

Unfortunately, what he is saying isn’t rooted in any fact. The piece inside is an NFC antenna, which powers Near Field Communication features. If you’ve ever used your phone to tap to pay at a cash register or put your phone back to back to another phone to exchange a file or picture, you’ve used it.

Oddthinking
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  • and the "secret chip" is merely a power management circuit :) – jwenting Jul 13 '15 at 06:02
  • At the risk of being pedantic, should we really have a link-only answer? :) – user5341 Jul 13 '15 at 14:10
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    @DVK: I was hoping the first paragraph would be sufficient. :-( – Oddthinking Jul 13 '15 at 14:20
  • @Oddthinking - I would suggest fleshing out more. – user5341 Jul 13 '15 at 14:24
  • Peculiar how KTLA introduces their debunking with *unfortunately*...?! – gerrit Jul 14 '15 at 13:11
  • Hm. Putting on my skeptic hat - does any of the sources actually offer **proof** (preferably, peer reviewed) that the chip is just NFC and NOT used for tracking? As in, some expert who actually analyzed the chip in detail, NOT simply said "oh, this is NFC because it kinda looks like it". Or analyzed 100% emissions from the chip. As it is, (without reading original articles, admittedly), from the quoted pieces, they are all just basielessly asserting that the claim is false, without a shred of actual proof that the claim is indeed false. – user5341 Jul 14 '15 at 16:42
  • (in part, I'm skeptical because most of the sources are Android blogs - which, in the main, are written by tech **journalists**, who are typically NOT EEs or chip experts) – user5341 Jul 14 '15 at 16:47
  • @DVK: I welcome the skepticism. If the evidence in the claim was stronger, perhaps the evidence in the answer would need to be. I agree that a peer-reviewed post from an expert would be preferable, and I would recommend voting for such an answer over this one. – Oddthinking Jul 14 '15 at 22:37
  • I considered looking for and posting evidence that using a battery without the antenna (they exist; I owned one) means that NFC stops working, but that would just start conspiracy theories that Samsung detect the lack of antenna and turn off the NFC feature. – Oddthinking Jul 15 '15 at 00:24
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    Why would Samsung need to add an extra antenna for spying when there's already a perfectly good long-distance antenna built in to the phone anyway? – JAB Mar 07 '17 at 23:03