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Plus, regardless of background or technical expertise, rooting your phone dramatically decreases security. Downvoters: so what security features do you lose an

• freedomben 7y ago
  Not a down voter, but I disagree with you. There's a fantastic example in my sibling post. Rooting gains you the ability to more tightly control network access. That alone is massive for privacy and security. Obviously you have to run code with lots of permissions, which means you could be highly compromised by a malicious app. The onus on the user is much higher to vet apps. At the end of the day you have to place some trust, even if you don't root. It's a game of balancing tradeoffs. It's overly simplistic to say that rooting dramatically decreases security regardless of background or technical expertise.
  • monoideism 7y ago
    Thanks for answering. I guess now that it's possible to install your own key to verify rooted images in many phones, the problem is somewhat attenuated. Losing verified boot is a major loss. So yes, that was a bit overly simplistic. I rooted my phones for a number of years before carefully looking at the pros and cons and deciding it was a poor choice for a consumer mobile phone. Obviously, we need root access for our dev machines and servers. But I try to follow the principle of least privilege, and in that case, not clear why root would be needed for a mobile phone. But I concede that for some use cases, it can be a trade-off. What other security advantage of rooting can you name besides tighter control of network access? Also, note that there are a few apps that allow some degree of firewall with unrooted phones. I also suspect there's a lot of room for improvement there.