How fakeroot is not a security breach in Linux?

After reading some pretty nice answers from this question , I am still fuzzy on why you would want to pretend that you are root without getting any of the benefits of actually being root. So far, what I can gather is that fakeroot is used to give ownership to a file that needs to be root when it is unzip/tar'ed. **My question, is why can't you just do that with chown?** A Google Groups discussion here points out that you need fakeroot to compile a Debian kernel (if you want to do it from an unprivileged user). **My comment is that, the reason you need to be root in order to compile is probably because read permissions were not set for other users. If so isn't it a security violation that fakeroot allows for compilation(which means gcc can now read a file that was for root)?** **This answer here describes that the actual system calls are made with real uid/gid of the user**, so again where does fakeroot help? How does fakeroot stop unwanted privilege escalations on Linux? **If fakeroot can trick tar into making a file that was owned by root, why not do something similar with SUID?** From what I have gathered, fakeroot is just useful when you want to change the owner of any package files that you built to root. But you can do that with chown, **so where am I lacking in my understanding of how this component is suppose to be used?**