GrapheneOSThis is an extreme misrepresentation of both what Gaël Duval said in this interview and our response to it. What he clearly said is that /e/ and Murena aren't providing security hardening which he claims is only useful for pedophiles, criminals and spies. Gaël Duval has repeatedly said this in his posts including ones where he directly says GrapheneOS is only useful for pedophiles, criminals and spies. We can show archives of numerous posts with him saying exactly that.
🌱🏴🅰️🏳️⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp@GrapheneOS I would switch to grapheneOS if I could use it on fairphone because I believe in an absolute right to privacy its not just for abusers. I'm not going to get a phone other than the fairphone because it's more important to me that there is no slavery and conflict minerals used in the phone and the modularity is a nice plus too. So unless grapheneOS supports a phone that has these features I can't ethically justify buying a phone without them just to use it.
#GrapheneOS #Android #Fairphone #ConflictMinerals #ModernSlavery
@ambiguous_yelp Fairphones don't come close to meeting our security requirements and we'll never work with a company partnered with Murena. You don't need to give any money or support to /e/ and Murena in order to use a Fairphone. You use LineageOS which is more private and secure than /e/.
Fairphone's claims about updates, long term support, privacy and security aren't accurate. It's possible their Chinese ODM has awful working conditions. They mostly use regular components regardless.
Olivenolje@GrapheneOS in a fairy world in which Fairphone met your hardware and software requirements, would you consider working with them?
Daniël@ambiguous_yelp @GrapheneOS maybe buying a second-hand Pixel is an option? Re-using a phone is a great way of reducing the impact of phone production.
Fairphone is bad when it comes to security. It doesn't have a secure element like the Titan M2 in the Pixel (only TrustZone) and their kernels, firmware blobs etc. are way outdated. Even on the FP6 they are still shipping firmware blobs from June last year, even though Qualcomm does monthly security bulletins.
@ambiguous_yelp @GrapheneOS For comparison, Apple added a secure element to iPhones in the 5s in 2013 (!). Google added the first Titan M secure element to the Pixel 3 in 2018: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/devices/pixel/titan-m-makes-pixel-3-our-most-secure-phone-yet/
Fairphone, Volla, etc. are waaay behind when it comes to device security and I would never recommend these devices to anyone.
(You cannot have privacy without security.)
nebucatnetzer@danieldk @ambiguous_yelp @GrapheneOS It is bad choises all around.
Using a second hand phone reduces the climate impact a bit but you're increasing the value of the device which is from an U.S. company. Especially one that has currently increasingly stupid ideas how Android should evolve.
In the end everybody has to pick their poison.
Using a second hand phone reduces the climate impact a bit but you're increasing the value of the device which is from an U.S. company. Especially one that has currently increasingly stupid ideas how Android should evolve.
In the end everybody has to pick their poison.
@nebucatnetzer @ambiguous_yelp @GrapheneOS That is very much a secondary effect though. By buying a new Fairphone you are directly financing a Chinese ODM (T2Mobile) that develops the hardware and software, with proprietary Chinese TCL blobs.
And for the large price you get a phone with an SoC, cameras, and speakers of a 200-300 Euro phone.
Most of the extra cost does not go to wages, the extra wage cost is ~$1.90 according to their own marketing materials
@nebucatnetzer @ambiguous_yelp @GrapheneOS Conflict-free minerals are a good point, but you save a lot more minerals (and thus labor extracting these minerals) by buying a second-hand phone, or ensuring that your phone gets a good second life by e.g. selling it.
@nebucatnetzer @ambiguous_yelp @GrapheneOS Moreover, what is better for longevity, a phone that gets nearly all updates on day 1 and has an SoC that is fast enough for years to come or a phone that is a security risk from day 1 and had a pretty mediocre SoC even when it was released?
E.g. Fairphone promised at least five years of updates for the Fairphone 4. However, in 2026 it still running a Linux patch release (4.19.197) from 2021.
a53bdbFairPhone is developed and made in China. Most factories there cruelly exploit workers. I don’t think it’s more ethical than Apple, at least you can report the Chinese factories like Foxconn to Apple and it works. And they can’t ship latest Android major releases and security patches, which makes long term support useless.
@a53bdb Fairphone pays their workers a higher wage. But I didnt mention that I was talking about modern slavery in mineral extraction.
@ambiguous_yelp @a53bdb If that's the case, how much are the workers at Fairphone's ODM paid compared to the ones working for Foxconn on iPhones?
Can you provide evidence there's less slavery involved in the supply chain for Fairphone's than iPhones?
Fairphone also uses a lot of standard components. Are you saying they have a more ethical Qualcomm SoC, display and similar components despite them being standard off-the-shelf components? Are those taken into account when comparing to iPhones?
@GrapheneOS @ambiguous_yelp China is a highly corrupt capitalist country, not the so-called socialism or communism. Officials and capitalists jointly exploit the people at the bottom. Without supervision like Apple, they will try their best to continue to exploit workers.
HéliosélèneThere is no absolute privacy on grapheneOS phones. For example using graphene's default browser vanadium, you end up being a lot more uniquely fingerprintable than with a regular android and google chrome.
So this is all a matter of threat model. GrapheneOS is secure, but no device connected to the internet is 100% private, and using grapheneOS stands out a lot more from a metadata standpoint (for now at least).
@helioselene @ambiguous_yelp GrapheneOS goes out of the way to avoid standing out as being GrapheneOS on networks and to services when people are using a VPN. That's why it has a toggle to use the standard connectivity checks. Fixing privacy and security vulnerabilities inherently makes it possible to see those are fixed but that doesn't mean it stands out.
Contrary to your claims, Vanadium has far better protection against fingerprinting than Chrome but doesn't have nearly as many users.
@helioselene @ambiguous_yelp GrapheneOS supports using any Android browser app. There's nothing forcing people to use Vanadium. If you prefer using Brave because it has a significantly larger userbase to blend into than Vanadium along with additional anti-fingerprinting features then you can use Brave instead. It isn't as secure as Vanadium and has privacy disadvantages too. Brave on GrapheneOS is more secure than Brave outside of GrapheneOS due the protections. Same applies to other browsers.
@helioselene @ambiguous_yelp Nearly everyone cares enough about privacy for receiving standard privacy and security patches to be highly important to them even if they don't realize it. The same applies to receiving the standard Android privacy and security protections. Most Android OEMs fail to deliver a bare minimum level of privacy and security. Murena devices are horrible from a basic privacy and security perspective. Dismissing this by claiming it's about threat models is simply nonsense.
I am not denying it, I juste said (or at least meant) that even using grapheneOS was not enough to be safe in an absolute way. No system is "enough" in every case, especially for systems connected to the internet. So one should study their threat model and not just rely on the OS however hardened it be, and adapt their practice accordingly (such as not using vanadium [edit: esp. with non-default lang or tz] for many sites if they fear they can be fingerprinted).
@helioselene @ambiguous_yelp There's not really any browser you can use to avoid fingerprinting. Nothing mainstream does a good enough job and a non-mainstream option means you can be fingerprinted solely based on using a super niche browser. Vanadium does a good job avoiding telling apart Vanadium users and there are several improvements we can make including a way to pretend to have the UTC time zone which it could prompt about at startup or it could have a fingerprint review for settings.
I acknowledge that one can use other browsers and that grapheneOS has a lot more protections than others OS-es.
When testing with vanadium on https://coveryourtracks.eff.org the first two results are green but the last one is not ("Your browser has a nearly-unique fingerprint").
Graphene is probably (one of) the most secure mobile OS. Users should still know its limits (every system has limits) so they stay safe. Security and privacy are as much about people than systems.
@helioselene @ambiguous_yelp Their data is outdated and doesn't take into account how quickly browsers have major releases. 45 days is far too long, it needs to be more like a week or 2 weeks.
It's also not representative of overall web browsing at all. Firefox is extremely over-represented in it.
Vanadium is on Chromium 147 in our Stable channel which was released very recently while Google has currently only rolled it out of 0.25% of users in their Stable channel:
@helioselene @ambiguous_yelp Why wouldn't the combination of using Vanadium, a major browser version of 147, your configured languages and time zone result in a unique or nearly unique value on this site? Hardly anyone uses it and we don't point people towards it as others do because it's not a good source of info. This site does not indicate that it's possible to tell you apart from other Vanadium users. You can set your language to US English only and a UTC time zone toggle is coming soon.
Thanks for the info on the timezone, that'll be a nice addition..