GrapheneOS heavily improves privacy compared to the Android Open Source Project in contrast with /e/ heavily reducing it.

GrapheneOS is far ahead of the standard pace for privacy patches instead of behind and we fix many privacy weaknesses ourselves. We've fixed a bunch of Android VPN leaks and many forms of data leaks to apps.

Since GrapheneOS is a serious privacy project, we have to put substantial work into security too because privacy depends on it.

The domains they block are a tiny subset of domains used for those purposes and do not stop the most privacy invasive behavior by apps.

Apps and SDKs have also increasingly bypassed DNS blocklists via DNS-over-HTTPS resolvers, hard-wired IP addresses and most of all moving connecting to third party APIs to their servers where they don't need to leak their API keys.

DNS filtering works fine on GrapheneOS but isn't a viable approach to protecting privacy.

Exodus Privacy uses a very similar approach to label apps as having trackers based on whether they include a library from a small list they've decided as trackers. Many of those decisions are dubious and it misses that the most privacy invasive behavior by apps isn't done that way. It also has extremely inaccurate labelling of permissions misleading users about how that works. Here's a great example of both with Facebook Lite:

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.facebook.lite/latest/

/e/, Murena and their supporters have spent years misleading people about GrapheneOS. They heavily push the false claims that it isn't a privacy project, isn't usable, isn't broadly compatible with apps and isn't useful to regular people. /e/ and Murena have repeatedly claimed GrapheneOS is only useful to criminals and spies. Here's the leader of both /e/ and Murena stating that as a broader claim about hardening in general:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116353973732143171

Murena misleads people about GrapheneOS as a core part of their business strategy. They tell people it's not usable by regular people despite requiring far less sacrifice. They say it's not compatible with apps despite it having far broader app compatibility.

They claim the protections we provide aren't useful to regular people and yet both Android and iOS keep adopting features we've created years later including Contact Scopes, locked device auto-reboot, hardware memory tagging and much more.

Authoritarians around the world have been heavily pushing the false narrative that end-to-end encryption and secure devices primarily benefit criminals. GrapheneOS has been a growing target of these attacks on open source privacy technology.

France is the epicenter of this with their national law enforcement engaging in a smear campaign towards GrapheneOS with false claims about our features, distribution and marketing conflating it with non-GrapheneOS devices. Murena has actively participated.