This 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.
https://tilde.zone/@notthebee/116358115664425978
We shared a video of Gaël Duval once again making these claims because that’s harder to dismiss than his written posts across platforms. He has made the same claims in both French and English. Multiple /e/ supporters participating in ongoing attacks on GrapheneOS with inaccurate claims have tried to dismiss this based on him not explicitly mentioning GrapheneOS in the video and by spinning what he said. That’s fine, we can make another thread with a collection of his posts saying this elsewhere.
Duval has a history of claiming serious privacy and security protections only help pedophiles, criminals and spies. He has explicitly smeared GrapheneOS this way repeatedly, but also attacks privacy projects in general as he did there.
/e/ and Murena products have poor privacy and atrocious security. Here’s information on that with links to coverage by third party experts:
We can make an expanded article with more info and more links to 3rd party experts included too.
2nd recent example of Duval portraying serious privacy/security protections as being for pedophiles:
https://www.clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-interview.html
Translation:
But above all, we must not confuse the issue: /e/OS allows its users to avoid the massive collection of personal data that takes place on smartphones currently on the market—it is not designed to help child sex offenders evade the law. In other words: /e/OS is not a system designed for enhanced security that would be useful only to specific individuals.
He repeats his extraordinarily false claim that they ship the latest security patches each month across devices which they don’t do on a single device let alone all of them. Shipping backports of AOSP patches is not providing all the security patches.
He once again misleads people about their speech-to-text service sending user data to OpenAI. Running it through their own servers first is not anonymizing it.
https://community.e.foundation/t/voice
He downplays the large number of default enabled Google services added by /e/ with extensive privileged access. Contrary to his claims, it does use Google Play binaries both in apps using it and ones downloaded by microG which they enabled by default.
Murena previously claimed server side encryption was good enough for their audience and comparable to actual end-to-end encryption. They ended up leaking highly sensitive user data across accounts for their services:
i’m glad he said this, i was planning on buying a murena phone up until i saw this interview and i hope to see the candida thoughts of all of ceo’s of products i plan on buying to help with my de-googling efforts.
i suckered in by google’s “don’t be evil” policy and getting a read of how the ceo sees the world is indicative of the trajectory a company is going to take and i don’t want to be stuck in the same walled garden 25 years from now like i am with google.