The surveillance problem is not black and white. A rooted phone may not help you if a state actor is after you, but it will help against companies that make mon

The surveillance problem is not black and white. A rooted phone may not help you if a state actor is after you, but it will help against companies that make money by building an invasive profile of who you are and what you do. Again how much a rooted phone helps in that depends on how many ties you want to cut with the digital-advertising ecosystem. Here's a paper describing the privacy invasive and potentially harmful properties of pre-installed apps [1]. I specifically saved this paper in my files so I can have a comprehensive answer when people ask me why I go through the trouble of rooting my devices. P.S. People who know more than me are saying that the baseband processor can be restricted with hardware practices such as IOMMU [2]. I don't really know how effective that can be. [1]: https://haystack.mobi/papers/preinstalledAndroidSW_preprint.pdf https://haystack.mobi/papers/preinstalledAndroidSW_preprint.... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20151431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20151431