Comment by tcoff91

10 hours ago

For those of us out of the loop, could someone summarize the situation?

  > Fairphone has said they don't plan to add a secure element. It can be seen from their current devices that they don't fully keep up with privacy/security backports and lag a year behind on shipping yearly OS releases. They skip over the monthly and quarterly releases entirely. They replaced their own non-GMS Fairphone OS with a dramatically less secure /e/OS option in partnership with Murena. They clearly demonstrate that security and even privacy are not the priorities.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114733211017800480

  • They replaced their own non-GMS Fairphone OS with a dramatically less secure /e/OS

    it sounds like they are saying that /e/OS is less secure than fairphone's own OS. with all criticism against /e/OS taken into account, i highly doubt that fairphone would have been able to make their own version of android more secure than /e/OS when they are not even interested in working on that.

    • It starts with simply rolling major releases out earlier than /e/OS. Remember that to get security fixes for vulnerabilities not marked high/critical, you need the QPR/major updates. Those vulnerabilities may not be an immediate RCE, but they might get used in exploit chains after an RCE. Also, Fairphone and /e/OS will have many known RCEs, because they do not roll out embargoed patches like GrapheneOS and to some extend Samsung & Pixel do.

  • One of the reasons I haven't switched to Graphene is this kind of drama. I wish there was more middle ground. I don't think the post is in any way constructive and will lead to fairphone to consider adding a secure element.

    • I don't see their post as 'drama' or nonconstructive at all. It's simply a list of well-founded criticisms of Fairphone's extremely lax position on security that is incompatible with Graphene's. If being critiqued for it doesn't lead to them considering adding a secure element, that's a problem on Fairphone's side imo.