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:

1. 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.
2. 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.