Thanks, but no. I'm never buying a device with easy root access for a non technical family member ever again. Freedom is great, and I'm using this freedom to buy something with exactly the capabilities I need.
To use the same logic, they shouldn't be given anything with a visible screw, or are you going to tell me they _wouldn't_ take a screw driver to an appliance because that would be silly for someone who doesn't know what they're doing in there?
To an extent, crime can't be eliminated. You can't even eliminate crime by instituting a strict authoritarian regime, because power corrupts, and those in power become criminals themselves. That's why turning big tech companies into paternalistic device authoritarians doesn't work. The big tech companies have become massively corrupt, demanding a 30% cut of everything that happens on your devices, in return for what? Some low paid, low skill reviewer spending a few minutes to approve or reject a third party app submission? That's not security, it's security theater.
There were phone scams before there were smartphones. Before there were mobile phones, when everyone had a landline. There's no technical solution for crime and scams, much as tech people want there to be. Education and viligence have always been the only effective resistance. Unfortunately, the big tech companies don't want to do education; to the contrary, they want consumers to be eternally technically ignorant—despite the increasing importance of computers in our lives—because that's more profitable. At least with cars, we have mandatory driver's education.
The problem is that a line is being drawn in an arbitrary place; if scammers are the worry, don't let them have a phone, or internet or email either, in fact just don't let them talk to any strangers in person or otherwise, but that would be awfully inconvenient for them.
Everyone is willing to make a compromise somewhere so long as the compromise isn't something they care about. Some readers probably think the suggestion of taking away their phone or email is absurd to protect them from scammers, and I'd place preventing root-access in the same category; not disabling it by default, I'm ok with that, but preventing it entirely.
My opinion is that everything should be secure by default, but when it's something you own, there should be reasonable, measured steps to "unsecure" it, whether that's removing a couple of screws, or accepting a disclaimer to gain root access to the device you own.
If I don't own it, let's cut the bullshit and tell me I'm merely licensing or renting it, and we'll adjust the price I'm willing to pay accordingly.
And non-owners shouldn’t be able to have access solely based on their physical possession - quite the contrary, owner should have means to fully use hardware security features for their personal benefit, locking their own device as tight as they want (within the device’s technical capabilities).
I have taken the opposite stance on that. Never again will they be left with some Samsung bloatware which hardly receives any Android updates when phones such as Nexus, Nokia and Nothing costs the same and has excellent LineageOS support.
Lineage is stable, bloat-free self-updating and requires no maintenance from my side.
As far as I know Mediatek (and vendors that use those chips) are usually not good with regards to GPL Compliance, which means no Lineageos if kernel sources are not available...
> I agree with the premise that consumer devices, such as mobile phones, should be as secure as they can by default. This can even go so far as shipping new devices with locked bootloaders and blocking access to root. ..
> But this shouldn’t come at the expense of being able to make an informed choice to unlock these privileges to install any software you want, even if that means adopting a higher level of risk.
One does not require "easy root access" to make that informed choice - complicated root access (within reason, as pulling out the soldering iron might be a step too far) should be enough for tasks like installing a new OS because the company no longer supports the hardware.