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grapheneos • yesterday at 5:01 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

The founder and leader of /e/ and Murena has repeatedly claimed highly private and secure devices primarily benefit criminals and pedophiles. He has also falsely claimed that GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals. /e/ and Murena heavily mislead users about what they provide. In reality, they lag incredibly far behind on standard privacy/security patches and protections. They set a fake Android security patch level despite having many patches missing. They even miss a large subset of the AOSP patches. Drivers and firmware are rarely updated and lag far behind the official releases. Linux kernel updates are barely provided.

/e/ adds many privacy invasive services to the OS including tracking users with random identifiers for updates. They sent user speech data to OpenAI for years without obtaining consent beyond it being hidden in a massive terms of service but have finally moved away from doing that in newer versions. They still have a bunch of other privacy invasive services and still add many more Google services compared to AOSP by default along with giving those privileged access. microG on /e/ downloads and runs Google Play executables with highly privileged access by default and they give highly privileged to Android Auto and other components as their way of getting those running.

https://clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-interview.ht...

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


Replies

glorth • yesterday at 6:33 PM

Like many people, my concern is not the hypothetical possibility of a security threat; it is the completely certainty that my data is being collected and monetized by private entities who have access to it "legitimately" (i.e., the technology is designed from the ground up to transmit it against my will).

So, sincere question - how is GrapheneOS superior to /e/ in protecting personal privacy against large corporations?

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