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
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.
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..