How to Enable Private Mode on Rooted Galaxy S5 with tripped Knox (0x1)

It is seen that, companies like Apple and Google are spending a lot of their resources on securing customers personal information. Recently, there was a fallback for Apple when hackers broke into online accounts of celebrities who had personal photos stored on Apple’s iCloud service. As of now, Apple is trying to reassure about its commitment to security and privacy. Google says it will also encrypt data by default in the upcoming Android L update.

Samsung too has security and privacy feature, Private Mode, on the Galaxy S5. You can turn it on in the settings, under “Private Mode” in the Personalization section. You can then go through your phone to mark certain content as private, for instance, just go to the Gallery app and select the photos or albums you want to keep private. Then hit the menu icon for the option to “Move to Private.” This also works with selected video, music, audio recordings. After you’ve marked your files as private, you need to go back to the settings to turn Private Mode off. Think of that setting as the door to a vault. Turning it on opens the door and lets you move stuff in and out. Turning it off closes and locks the door. It’s the opposite of what you might think: Private Mode needs to be off for your content to be secure.

However, once you have tripped the knox counter on your Galaxy S5, you are no longer into Samsung’s standards, and you can’t enable the “Private mode”. Knox is something that bothers Samsung users who like to gain root access to their devices. Knox counter keeps track of how many times users flash the device with different ROMs, recoveries and custom kernels.

But thanks to XDA developer’s Wuby986 who have managed to enable the “private mode” feature even when you have tripped the Knox counter on your Samsung Galaxy S5. For ease of use, the developer has provided a twrp/cwm recovery flashable zip for users.