Samsung, like other OEMs, partners with third-party companies to include their apps on Galaxy devices. For example, Microsoft pays Samsung millions to pre-install certain Office apps . But one of these partners might not be on the up and up.

The Problem with Device Care

All recent Samsung phones have a menu called Device Care in Settings. This is a set of features that help optimize various parts of the phone for better performance. One of these features will scan your internal storage to find unused apps and other unnecessary data, then make it easy to delete these files to free up space.

But if you look at the Storage menu in Device Care, you'll see "powered by +360" or similar. +360 is the icon for Qihoo 360, a Chinese data-mining and antivirus company which has some shady practices. Their software has been alleged to be spyware, as reports indicate their willingness to hand over any data to the Chinese government. And this same company is powering the storage scanner on your device with full access to your data.

Recently, a Reddit user found that this app is communicating with 360's servers during each scan. But this isn't new — XDA users found the same shady behavior last year. While we don't know what data is being sent, we do know the servers are Qihoo 360's Chinese servers.

If it were solely the storage scanner in device care, you could possibly just disable the problematic app with ADB. But the same communication with Qihoo 360's servers has been observed in other pre-installed apps:

Samsung ApexService

ANT+ HAL Service

Application installer

Assistant Menu

AirCommandManager

And these are just a few of the apps. This means, potentially, Qihoo360 could have data pertaining to all aspects of your phone usage. And since all these services are so deeply integrated, you can't just uninstall them. Instead, your best bet is to block network traffic from your phone to Qihoo 360's servers.