[Security Discussion] maccc:
I currently have AOKP (Maclaw) installed on my Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini, but as I was looking through the apps, there was one particular app that got me slightly concerned. It´s called Panda and when I click it, the only option I have is to "Enable Energy Save Mode", yet that utterly simple app has FULL access to the entire phone.

Firstly with Panda, you do not have the option to uninstall it the easy way, so a noob is forced to have it there.

If you try to forcibly stop Panda in the app manager, it will restart itself automatically.

Further more - Panda have the perrmissions to

- directly call phone numbers

read phone status and identity

- read your text messages (SMS or MMS)

send MMS messages

- take pictures and photos

- record audio

- approximate location (network-based)

precise location (GPS and network-based)

- modify your contacts

read your contacts

- read your own contact card

- modify or delete the contents of your SD card

- disable your screen lock

- set an alarm

- read Google service configuration

use accounts on the device

view configured accounts

- read terms you added to the dictionary

- change system display settings

modify secure system settings

retrieve system internal status

- change network connectivity

change WiMaX state

connect and disconnect from Wi-Fi

connect and disconnect from WiMaX

control Near-Field Communication

full network access

view network connections

view Wi-Fi connections

- access Bluetooth settings

pair with Bluetooth devices

- re-order running apps

retrieve running apps

run at startup

- draw over other apps

- control vibration

prevent phone from sleeping

- add words to user-defined dictionary

- change your audio settings

. read sync settings

read sync statistics

toggle sync on and off

- expand / collaps status bar

- modify system settings

read battery statistics

read Home settings and shortcuts

test access and protected storage

write Home settings and shortcuts

- full permissions to all device features and storage

- Set global theme

..meaning I guess that this Panda app has full administrator/root permissions.. - ..but why?

Why does a seemingly useless application like Panda have root permissions, which in turn also makes it fairly difficult to remove? What is the application Panda´s true purpose? Why is it there in the first place? What does it do, exactly?

My concerns with these alternative smartphone operating systems is that there might be an Ubuntu/Debian scenario, where Debian is a nice clean OS giving you the very basics and letting you choose whatever extra you want from there, whereas Ubuntu comes with a lot of extra stuff that you do not really need and / or should be given the ability to choose if you wanted to install or not, upon install.

So, I guess my question to the experienced, security- and privacy-oriented smartphone-OS user is:

What is the best alternative smartphone OS that gives you a simple OS without anything extra such as that suspicious Panda app?

In other words, which smartphone alternative out there today can be trusted the most to respect my privacy? I would of course look into Firefox OS if it was available.

Am I being overly paranoid about AOKP? Should I just keep that, or perhaps Cyanogenmod is the way to go? Or perhaps I am missing an even better solution?

Thanks.