Gaël Duval is the founder and president of the /e/ foundation along with the CEO of Murena. Duval and his organizations have consistently taken a stance against protecting users from exploits. In this video, he once again claims protecting against exploits is only useful for pedophiles and spies.
Translation to English:
> There's the attack surface, on that front we're not security specialists here, so I couldn't answer you precisely, but from the discussions I've had, it seems that everything
> we do reduces attack surface. However, we don't have a "hardened security" approach, we aren't developing a phone for pedo(censored) so they can evade justice. So there aren't difficult things to check if the memory is corrupted, really hardened security stuff that could clearly be useful for executives, in the secret service, or whatever. That's not our goal, our goal is to start from an observation: today our personal data is constantly being plundered and that wouldn't be legal in real life
> with the mail or the telephone, we want to change that. So we are making you a product that changes that by default for anyone.
Transcription in French:
> Il y a la surface d'attaque, là pour le coup on est pas des spécialistes de la sécurité, donc je ne pourrais pas te répondre avec précision, mais des discussions que j'ai eu, il semblerait que tout ce qu'on fait, ça réduit la surface d'attaque. Donc oui, probablement ça aide. Par contre, on a pas une approche "sécurité durcie", on développe pas un téléphone pour les pédo(bip) pour qu'ils puissent échapper à la justice. Donc il y a pas des trucs pas possibles pour voir
> si la mémoire est pas corrompue, des trucs de sécu vraiment durcis qui pourraient être utiles clairement pour des dirigeants, dans les services secrets ou que sais-je. C'est pas notre but, notre but c'est de partir d'un constat, aujourd'hui nos données personnelles sont pillées en permanence et ça serait pas légal dans la vraie vie avec le courrier ou le téléphone, on veut changer ça. Donc on vous fait un produit qui change ça par défaut pour n'importe quelle personne.
GrapheneOS exists to protect users from having their privacy invaded by arbitrary individuals, corporations and states. Privacy depends on security. GrapheneOS heavily improves both privacy and security while providing a high level of usability and near perfect app compatibility.
/e/ has far worse privacy and security than the Android Open Source Project. They fail to keep up with important standard privacy and security patches for Android, Linux, firmware, drivers and HALs. They fail to provide current generation Android privacy and security protections.
For years, Gaël Duval has spearheaded a campaign to misrepresent GrapheneOS as not being usable, not compatible with apps and only useful to a tiny minority of people. He has repeatedly claimed GrapheneOS is for pedophiles, criminals and spies while claiming /e/ is for everyone.
It's hardly only GrapheneOS focusing on protecting users against exploits. Apple and Google have put a ton of work into it. Apple heavily focuses on privacy and security. That includes protecting against remote exploits, local exploits from compromised apps and data extraction.
GrapheneOS and iOS are both heavily focused on privacy and security. Both are gradually adding much stronger protections against apps/sites scraping data, coercion users into giving data via alternatives with case-by-case consent and increasingly strong exploit protections.
/e/ is far weaker in all of these areas compared to the standard Android Open Source Project on secure hardware. It doesn't keep up with standards updates and protections. It adds tons of low security attack surface and privacy invasive services. It's not in the same space as us.
/e/ and Murena devices are far worse for privacy and security than an iPhone. It's trivial to break into their devices remotely or extract data from them compared to an iPhone. They have weaker privacy protections from apps too. Their main approach to privacy is a DNS blocklist.
Their DNS blocklist can only block domains not used for useful functionality to avoid ruining usability. Meanwhile, the most privacy invasive behavior by apps is rarely ever split out into separate domains. Even for those, apps and websites can trivially evade DNS blocklists.
It's common for apps and websites to do everything through their own servers. That's best practice to avoid leaking API keys. It's increasingly common for invasive libraries to use hard-wired IPs and/or DNS-over-HTTPS to evade blocking. DNS filtering is increasingly less useful.
Murena is a for-profit company owned by shareholders including Gaël Duval. /e/ has a non-profit organization which is also led by Gaël Duval. /e/ includes paid services from Murena. /e/ very clearly exists to build products for Murena to sell in order to enrich the shareholders.
Despite being done for profit, /e/ receives millions of euros in funding from the EU on an ongoing basis. /e/ and Murena use extraordinarily inaccurate marketing to not only promote their products/services but also to mislead people about GrapheneOS and scare them away from it.
Recently, France's national law enforcement began fearmongering about GrapheneOS and smearing it with inaccurate claims. France's corporate and state media heavily participated. Many articles and also radio/television coverage misrepresented GrapheneOS as being for criminals.
Across French corporate and state media covering it, inaccurate claims by the state about features, distribution and marketing of GrapheneOS were wrongly presented as fact. Most of them didn't contact us and we weren't shown what was being claimed so we could properly respond.
Téléphones protégés utilisés par les narcotrafiquants : « Rien n’est inviolable ! »
Les téléphones Google Pixel équipés du système d’exploitation GrapheneOS permettent à des criminels de dissimuler leurs échanges. Johanna Brousse, magistrate spécialisée dans la lutte contre la cybercriminalité, explique quels sont les moyens de la justice pour contourner ce type d’outils.
/e/ and Murena are based in France. They've been pushing false narratives about GrapheneOS falsely claiming it isn't usable by regular people and doesn't benefit them for years. Duval has been making the ludicrous claim GrapheneOS is only useful to criminals and spies for years.
/e/ and Murena aren't on the same side as GrapheneOS. They're charlatans selling devices with poor privacy and atrocious security to earn money. They've spent years trying to undermine a legitimate privacy project and heavily use the same talking points as police state advocates.
Their marketing heavily focuses on avoiding Google and gives the impression they believe privacy means avoiding one company. Meanwhile, they add a bunch of Google services not present in the Android Open Source Project and give extensive privileged access to Google apps/services.
/e/ and Murena have their own privacy invasive behavior in their apps and services. One particularly egregious example is their supposedly private speech-to-text service sending user data to OpenAI without consent instead of doing most locally like Apple:
https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using-open-ai/70509
Voice to Text feature using Open AI
Thank you a lot for your positive and supporting comments about our new /e/OS Voice-to-text! Regarding its implementation in /e/OS, I’d like to explain a few things to explain why we have chosen an OpenAI STT API to implement it and how it’s going to evolve in the future: What we have learned from our experimentations with STT models that run locally on the smartphone for speech recognition: they work quite poorly, they make a lot of mistakes in voice recognition they are not able to mix la...
/e/ and Murena have repeatedly claimed GrapheneOS is for drug dealers, pedophiles, terrorists and spies. /e/ and Murena are anti-privacy. They're heavily profiting from marketing products as private but don't believe in it. /e/ is an authoritarian-aligned fake privacy project.
France is the most anti-encryption, anti-privacy and anti-security country in the EU. They've been doing a gradual crackdown on open source privacy projects including GrapheneOS and Signal with escalating smears and threats. /e/ and Murena are on the side of the police state.
That interview is not Gaël Duval misspeaking but rather he's expressing views we've seen him communicate in written form many times before. He has repeatedly misled people about what GrapheneOS provides and claimed it's only useful to criminals. He supported those media attacks.
Gaël Duval has repeatedly spread harassment content targeting our team with fabricated stories and bullying. Perhaps all of this is because he wants to maximize profits for Murena, but how is he going to achieve that by claiming serious privacy and security is for pedophiles?
Here's a paywall bypass for the 2 paywalled articles above:
https://archive.is/UrlvK
https://archive.is/AhMsj
These are among the most egregious cases of France's corporate and state media presenting highly inaccurate state smearing of GrapheneOS as fact but there's much more.
@GrapheneOS is there a good English translation?
@cutesobri @GrapheneOS No the translation is clearly not accurate. What G.D. says in french is the /e/ fundation builds an os you could not trust to hide from heavy investigations. In the mainlines, if you're pedocriminal, spy, executive, whatever, their operating system is not build for, it is (just) built to reduce everyday footprint in daily usage.
@jsa I don’t know. They literally say “We don’t develop a phone for pedophiles to evade justice.” (“[…] on développe pas un téléphone pour les pédo(bip) pour qu'ils puissent échapper à la justice.”) Pedocriminals seem to be the main example they chose. They could’ve focused on other groups and instead mention secret services and the like.
@cutesobri @GrapheneOS @Fnordinger @cutesobri @GrapheneOS Is
@GrapheneOS developping for pedocriminals ? To my knowledge no, but your assumption presuppose this. Do not forget that these are criminals, hence act like such. If a government approved tool serve their idiotic interests, they'll use it, legally or not, will you tell this tool is for criminals ? I think, the way G.D. speaks between words means : pedocriminals, we do not need and do not want you as users and I do not see any link to grapheneos in this.
@jsa @Fnordinger @cutesobri Your attempt at spinning what was said by Gaël Duval is completely pointless because he has repeatedly made these statements in both French and English across platforms. He has repeatedly smeared GrapheneOS with the ludicrously false claim that it's only useful for pedophiles, criminals and spies. This isn't a one-off statement by him but rather a consistent belief he holds. Duval has consistently claimed serious privacy and security protections are morally wrong.
@jsa @Fnordinger @cutesobri Duval's consistent statements smearing providing far more serious privacy and security protections are going to contribute to the ongoing crackdown on privacy and security in France. It's clear why Duval is doing it. /e/ is a heavily government-supported project and heavily marketed based on it being based in France and the EU. He wants the government to crack down on far more private and secure options while sparing his products. He's consistently driven by greed.
GrapheneOS
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