Comment by grapheneos

They're making inaccurate attacks on GrapheneOS to mislead people. We have sponsorships for our server infrastructure with those companies listed here:

https://grapheneos.org/sponsors

We also list the sponsors of specific servers in our server documentation:

https://grapheneos.org/articles/grapheneos-servers

Four of our sponsors are dedicated server companies and one is a VPN company sponsored 2 dedicated servers for us via one of their dedicated servers providers where they have a large discount on the hardware and traffic.

IPinfo is a well known GeoIP company. They provide open source projects including Alma Linux and GrapheneOS with free access to geolocation database downloads. We use it to implement GeoDNS on our self-hosted anycast DNS clusters. They get most of their GeoIP data from crawling the internet with over 1300 probes which makes it far more accurate than the more traditional options based on WHOIS and geofeeds.

What's sketchy about any of these companies? They also don't receive anything more than being listed on our site which we would do for transparency regardless.

GrapheneOS is entirely funded by donations but other donations by both companies and individuals are informal rather than official sponsorships. For example, Proton and Cape have both repeatedly made donations to GrapheneOS.

> Only hardware that supports bootloader relocking are Pixel devices

That's not quite right, but Pixels are the only devices providing all of the hardware requirements for GrapheneOS listed here:

https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices

GrapheneOS will also support future Motorola devices meeting all of these our requirements and providing official GrapheneOS support. Those will likely be available in under a year.

> I can't say anything about VPN affiliation, but everything else is complete bollocks.

Mullvad and Proton have both sponsored GrapheneOS with donations. All they wanted was us to say they donated to us which we would do for transparency anyway. We have no obligation to ever post about it again or to say anything positive about either company.

They're describing Tor as a government sponsored VPN and are claiming we promoted it because we answered people's questions about using it on GrapheneOS and have a small amount of documentation on using it. We don't specifically promote using Tor. We regularly caution people about the risk of making themselves into targets with it by accessing the public internet via exit nodes. Tor makes sense for some situations but we generally recommend using a traditional VPN for most people's use cases.