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Comment by grugdev42 | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, what is gained from this move? Why would a government care? Are rooted phones really that much of a problem?

Surely most people running a rooted phone are tech enthusiasts. Cybercriminals will just use regular phones bought under false names and dispose of them afterwards.

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> Why would a government care

Viet Nam is in the process of rolling out mandatory biometric identification and verification as part of the VNeID project [0], and mobile operators are in the process of rolling out identity stamping if mobile devices using VNeID [1]

Viet Nam is also an authoritarian state who's current leader (To Lam) spent his entire career in Viet Nam's KGB (MPS/BCA). Unlike Westerners, Vietnamese know the red lines - this is why I and my SO (much to her chagrin due to my insistence) never travel back to VN with my personal accounts or devices, and why we keep some friends of friends on speed dial.

[0] - https://vneid.gov.vn/

[1] - https://vtv.vn/nha-mang-ho-tro-kich-hoat-sim-truc-tuyen-bang...

I am not sure what you are saying with respect to red lines.

Vietnamese government will not arrest a tourist foreigner for talking bad about the party or about Ho Chi Minh, it would decimate their tourist bottom line. If you don't deal with drugs or actively don't organise against the party, you will be fine.

There is a growing surveillance (which you cited well) but mostly for locals.

edit: oh I misread, you are Viet Kieu, not a western tourist. OK yeah that makes some sense.

Yep! Tourists are excluded. Also, my SO is Viet turned Viet Kieu (not me), but we have significant familial and business ties in VN.

the banks would care. less money spent on security or dealing with clients who had their money stolen

Are you implying there's a big percentage of people getting their money stolen because they rooted their phones? I'd like to see some data on that if so.

I think the point is that phone apps are more secure than, for example, web apps.

Users that try to use mobile apps as if they were web apps, disabling location, and security features are just flagged by numerous security mechanisms.

Probably. I know a guy who roots phones for older people or friends parents, installs pirated games and such for them and making sure it is locked down in certain ways for the older generation.

In other words, the correlation is that older people are more likely to have a rooted phone and are more susceptible to fraud.

Dunno how widespread this is, just something to keep in mind.

Perhaps people who unknowingly bought a rooted phone. I don't know how frequent this is, but it would be the only case it would matter.

I don't know the reality, but my guess would be that it's the inverse of what you proposed; a significant portion of fraud cases identified by banks involved a rooted phone. From the defender's perspective, this could be a problem they run into over and over again, and take an outside place in their eyes.

At the cost of making society even more dependent on Google and Apple.

“Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.”

Quite a contrast from the quote about civilization advancing in proportion to the size and scope of things it can achieve automatically.

Dug it up. Alfred Whitehead:

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

it's not about rooted or not, but rather who controls what OS you run.

and that's enormous power for those who want to centralize power into their hands.

They gain credibility with overseas banks. Otherwise, the banks can just say "why do we need to support Vietnam? Too much fraud" and block access from Vietnam and VPNs.

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