GrapheneOS/e/ and Murena have been been promoting their products by misleading people about GrapheneOS for years. This has turned into an all out war on GrapheneOS by their company and supporters. We began regularly debunking their inaccurate claims and they try to frame it as aggression.
They've created widespread misconceptions about the GrapheneOS project with inaccurate claims about the purpose of the project and what it provides to users. Many people incorrectly believe they aren't our target audience or that it wouldn't be a good fit for them due to this.
GrapheneOS is a privacy project which is intended to be usable by everyone. Usability and app compatibility are top priorities. Our userbase largely isn't highly technical. It's very easy to install and use. Devices can be purchased around the world with GrapheneOS preinstalled.
There's a comparison between operating systems based on the Android Open Source Project at https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm which provides a good overview of how GrapheneOS compares to other options. GrapheneOS is clearly a privacy project and is a major innovator in privacy protections.
GrapheneOS has an extremely high level of app compatibility. Nearly every Android app can be used on it which is crucial for broad usability. A tiny subset of Android apps banning using an alternate OS which we haven't yet worked around or convinced to allow it are incompatible.
Our primary focus is improving the usability and out-of-the-box experience of GrapheneOS. We're continuing to add own privacy and security focused implementations of functionality normally provided by Google apps/services. The user-facing apps are being overhauled and replaced.
We already shipped our own network-based location and geocoding implementations which we'll be making more discoverable. Our high quality local text-to-speech implementation is shipping soon and we'll also be providing a local speech-to-text implementation. A lot more is coming.
/e/ bundles many privacy invasive apps/services. That includes adding a bunch of Google services not present in AOSP with privileged access. They implement speech-to-text by sending user data to OpenAI without informing users about it. We cannot do that.
Providing users with privacy requires ongoing work to address privacy vulnerabilities. GrapheneOS keeps up with the standard Android privacy patches. We also fix many Android privacy issues ourselves including VPN leaks. We're actively working on fixing remaining VPN issues.
Privacy heavily depends on security. Security vulnerabilities are widely exploited to obtain user data. State actors aren't the only ones exploiting vulnerabilities and it's not at all limited to targeted attacks. Privacy depends on fixing both privacy and security flaws.
Commercially developed exploits are widely deployed against users both online and in the physical world. Broadly using exploits against many people at a protest, crossing a border or visiting a high traffic website is not a small scale targeted attack. This is not going away.
/e/ and Murena have repeatedly repeated attacks by authoritarians on privacy technology by claiming without basis that GrapheneOS is mainly useful to criminals and used by criminals. They're claiming it about hardening against vulnerabilities in general:
These inaccurate talking points used by /e/ and Murena to mislead people about the purpose of GrapheneOS, what it provides and who uses it are heavily propagated by their supporters to harm GrapheneOS in podcasts, blog posts, forums, social media and elsewhere. It's pervasive.
/e/ and Murena are based in France. Recently, France's national law enforcement has been smearing GrapheneOS, Signal and other privacy projects. They've heavily pushed the same false narrative as /e/ and Murena claiming GrapheneOS primarily benefits and is used by criminals.
Both state and corporate media in France repeated inaccurate claims from their nationa law enforcement without questioning it. They presented false claims about the features, distribution, marketing and userbase. They conflated it with sketchy products which aren't GrapheneOS.
/e/ and Murena are aligning themselves with these false narratives about genuine privacy and security projects. Their supporters are also aligning themselves with this. Their concept of privacy is control and surveillance by EU corporations and governments instead of the US.
Podcast Projets Libres heavily promotes /e/ and Murena. They've consistently misrepresented the GrapheneOS project to promote those. Our corrections have consistently been ignored. They recently published an episode heavily pushing many of these false narratives about GrapheneOS.
The /e/ enthusiast interviewed in the podcast replied twice to our thread from 4 days earlier addressing Duval's claims about hardening being for pedophiles and GrapheneOS somehow not being a privacy project. This is exactly the narrative which was heavily pushed in the episode.
After our response to their post promoted the podcast episode was once again ignored, we posted https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116380872236123594 as a top-level thread addressing it. Following this, they made one minor correction while keeping the outrageous claim we aren't a privacy project fully intact.
GrapheneOS (@[email protected])
The claims made about GrapheneOS in this interview are extremely inaccurate. It heavily misrepresents the purpose of GrapheneOS and what we've worked on for years. The claim GrapheneOS is a security project rather than a privacy project is misinformation. Contacts are specifically brought up and yet our Contact Scopes feature is ignored. @[email protected] knows GrapheneOS is a privacy project. He replied to a thread with our response to this misinformation only 4 days ago... https://piaille.fr/@projetslibres_podcast/116379561169492214
Podcast Projets Libres and Framasoft have closely worked with /e/ to promite it. /e/ is not a legitimate privacy project but rather one which fails to provide basic standard patches and protections while adding invasive services. These people are not legitimate privacy advocates.
/e/ isn't a privacy project but rather a digital sovereignty project. It receives millions of euros in funding from the EU with the goal of moving technology within the control of the EU. /e/ supports violating people's right to privacy as long as it's France and the EU doing it.
https://www.projets-libres.org/en/podcast/e-os-a-degoogled-android-gael-duval-e-foundation-murena/
> The European Union has subsidized us to the tune of several million for this project.
Murena sells products largely built with funding received from the EU. It's government funding being used to heavily enrich the shareholders of the Murena company.
Many European countries have a major issue with Apple preventing them from accessing user data by implementing strong security protections and strong end-to-end encryption. /e/ provides an option within their control which fails to keep up with basic privacy and security patches.
France's government and law enforcement have become extremely hostile towards disk encryption, end-to-end encryption and secure devices. Murena is trying to differentiate themselves from projects providing strong privacy and security while deriding those as being for criminals.
0mnicore@GrapheneOS And my guesstimate is that by adopting Linux they will be the ones to engineer the age verification and surveillance mechanism in Linux. Of course they have the basics implemented by systemd and the “freedesktop”
@GrapheneOS Also if and when these things are put in place the West will have lost in mankind’s history. It will no longer be the place of freedom and democracy. It will be no better than most of the countries in the East we now label as authoritarian, dictatorships etc
@GrapheneOS Of course throughout history simple people were never supposed to be free. And the freedom we had since mid 80s withe rise of personal computers was probably an exception and now time has come for the powers that be to remove these freedoms.