Hi,
The general consensus amongst the Android community is that rooting is detrimental to privacy. In a sense, I agree with them since privilege escalation because of human error becomes a much bigger threat if the user has root access.
Android has a big privacy problem encapsulated in one word: “baseband”. Your modem and other hardware running in your device don’t run FOSS firmware and are likely actively malicious towards your privacy.
I am a Linux user, and I understand that concepts do not necessarily transfer well between the two. With that in mind:
- If I wanted to be absolutely certain that sensistive hardware like Camera, Microphone and Modem were truly off, would shutting them off as root hold any real significance?
- I do not know what the equivalent of Intel ME is called in the Android space, but I doubt that a highly complex OS is running beneath general Android as we know it. I think it’s just the firmware of the individual device that we need to worry about.
- Is it possible to replace the bootloader on some Android devices/prevent it from loading unwanted firmware?
With Google taking Android behind closed doors, I suspect we will start seeing some suspicious snippets of code here and there with questionable purpose, but which might be missed by FOSS volunteers because of the sheer volume of work that is. I’m thinking of ways we can try to evade this blatant grab of our personal data.
If you want to run full Foss system then there is pinephone with Linux OS and physical switches to turn off camera and microphone and other stuff. But it is still in very very early stage and it may increase your privacy but it will definitely reduce your security.
I understand camera and microphone access to malicious actor could be a valuable. But if you think your phone’s camera is compromised you have bigger problems.
That being said, graphene OS is considered by far the most secure android OS. It has features to turn off camera, mic, sensors. But more importantly it has a lot of additional security features making it harder for anyone to break in. And that using Graphene is or any other is doesn’t directly make you secure.
Yes I can agree to assume baseband and all the other proprietary firmware is running a malicious code. But they can’t use it to do mass surveillance, because if they do someone will detect it sooner or later. And also this is not the right tool for mass surveillance. 99% people will and have already downloaded apps that track almost everything they do.
And if your threat model requires you to be safe from malicious firmware, then maybe smart phones aren’t for you.