Newly Rooted; and Customized! Excited and Nervous!

[droidedin]

Hello Forum,

I recently rooted and installed Bugless Beast on my Droid. I love the new slick interface along with the improved speed. However, part of me is a little concerned about the privacy risks of installing a Rom that was developed by some college kid. Could he now be logging all of my keystrokes and info?

What are the risks?

What exactly does a custom ROM open you up to?

~DroidedIn

 

[hemorrdroid]

Well i and tens of thousands of people have been using BB with no security issues for a long time. Running a rooted phone opens you up to free tethering, screen shot apps, overclocking among other things. Running a custom rom on your rooted phone often has added features such as custom scripts that you can use in terminal emulator such as free100mb which attempts to keep 100mb of ram free at all times, as well as blockads which helps keep ads from loading in your browser and apps, and others to remove preloaded apps you dont want, and to swap some out with another such as the boot up image. BB also automatically overclocks your phone as long as you have a custom kernel loaded, allowing you to choose rather or not to run an app to control the CPU speed.

 

[droidedin]

I hear ya! But how do you know for sure? What do you think about using the newly unleashed phone for logging in to banking, or other sensitive accounts?

 

[JimmyD]

I hear ya! But how do you know for sure? What do you think about using the newly unleashed phone for logging in to banking, or other sensitive accounts?

That's completely your call. Use judgement that suits your needs the best.

Personally, I browse the internet on my Droid using the same safe-browsing methods that I practice when browsing the internet from my home PC.

 

[christim]

There is no doubt someone could sneak something in. It took months for someone to announce the live wallpaper thing at the Black Hat convention in Vegas. One would hope that various folks review the code and would catch such a thing, and if found that dev would be done.

There almost is no such thing as too much security. To be as secure as possible I'd do the following, but I bet most won't....but this is an option:

When you rooted your phone you made a backup before installing any rom, right? If not you should have. If you didn't make one, make one now, then go back to stock and make one. Now you can flash between the stock rom and "that other rom". It takes 5 minutes to swap between the two roms, maybe less. When you want to do something secure, use the stock one. For all else, use the "other rom".

And just like the LW that sent stuff to china, any app you install from the market has the potential to do the same thing.

Not trying to scare anyone...I'm just saying

And meanwhile I'll continue to use my rooted rom, but I also don't go installing every app under the sun, just popular ones that most other people also like. Which doesn't make it 100% safe, but safe enough in my book. Now, go and install all those "girlie" apps and you probably increase your risk a bit.