Comment by grapheneos
14 hours ago
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...
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?
There is a huge list of issues with /e/OS. Let me just give you a few examples:
Android 17 introduced a local network permission. GrapheneOS ported to Android 17 months ago. LineageOS, which /e/OS is based on just recently started releasing Android 17 updates. /e/OS may not be on Android 17 yet, I haven't checked. So, imagine for months apps have had access to the local network. What can they do with that?
That's just one example of how being far behind on updates can affect privacy.
/e/OS is far less deGoogled than GrapheneOS.
/e/OS lacks features like Storage Scopes, Contacts Scopes, Secure Paste, and sensors permission.
The vast, vast, vast majority of Android devices aren't on Android 17 yet. The update has just started rolling out to 2026 flagships from non-google manufacturers.
So, yes, grapheneos piggybacking on google's support for a single device do give them Android 17 faster. But you're saying that as if lineageos, who supports a vast amount of devices, is being lazy/careless with security by pointing to something that only the Pixel has yet (and grapheneos by association).
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GrapheneOS is a privacy project and heavily improves it with important privacy protections including Contact Scopes, Storage Scopes, secure paste and much more. It preserves all of the standard privacy and security of AOSP while greatly improving upon both. It has major improvements to both privacy and security, but it's also starting from the point of the standard privacy and security being intact.
GrapheneOS doesn't connect to Google servers by default and avoids integrating any privileged access for either Google apps or partial replacements for those. The main operating systems integrating microG included always granted privileged access for microG, Google Play executables downloaded by microG (droidguard) which run with the privileged access it's granted and other Google apps including Android Auto.
https://grapheneos.org/features
/e/ greatly reduces both privacy and security compared to AOSP through not keeping up with standard patches, not providing important standard privacy/security protections and adding problematic services. It lags behind incomplete backports to older releases by many weeks or even months while not fully providing all the patches. They set an inaccurate Android security patch level across devices so users believe they have a lot of patches they don't. Users are also led to believe those are all the Android privacy/security patches when it's a minority of the overall patches due to most not being backported. Firmware, driver and kernel updates are largely not provided by /e/ even when those are available from the vendors including for Pixels. Those have extreme delays when they are provided, often being years behind for Pixels.
/e/ also doesn't keep all of the standard security model intact due to the changes made by LineageOS and /e/.
/e/ also adds a bunch of privacy invasive services along with rolling back privacy and security in many other ways.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand...