Comment by ragequittah
17 hours ago
I can root my Android phone and have in the past, but I have absolutely no desire to do so now because it adds almost no functionality in exchange for a very large security risk. I consider rooting my phone in the past quite a foolish move by someone who didn't know better.
People are trading the future of personal computing just so they can run a banking app and justify it with "but I want my phone to be locked down for security." Not even sleepwalking into corporate-controlled-computing, but actively promoting it.
10, 15 years from now the ability to run your own code will be a distant memory unless you constantly subscribe to an annual Developer Account with BigCorp. Oh no, you've coded something that violates the ToS; account terminated.
Such a wild take to me. I install an entirely different operating system on my phone (graphene) which also advises me not to root because it's stupidly unsafe to do so. I also don't log in as root on linux, nor do I log in as an administrator in windows. None of these are sane practices to anyone worried about security.
To be honest this matter more on graphene than on linux or windows because of the sandboxing of all apps by default.
On Linux and Windows it doesn't make a huge difference to be admin or not on a single user system. If you have a process on windows running with your user rights it can access all your data, which means game over already. Same on Linux if you aren't using heavily sandboxed flatpaks or do not run all your apps inside jails using tools like landrun or firejail.
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I have plenty of devices like raspberry pi’s and handheld Linux gaming devices that allow free unlimited access. My phone is the one thing I want fully secured because it’s where all my most important data and keys are.
and yet it's likely to be less secure than all the others.
or does your xterm binary scans your contract list and recently opened apps and upload all that to Facebook servers? because most apps on your so secure phone do exactly that