We were contacted by a journalist at Le Parisien newspaper with this prompt:
I am preparing an article on the use of your secure personal data phone solution by drug traffickers and other criminals. Have you ever been contacted by the police?
Are you aware that some of your clients might be criminals? And how does the company manage this issue?
Absolutely no further details were provided about what was being claimed, who was making it or the basis for those being made about it. We could only provide a very generic response to this.
Our response was heavily cut down and the references to human rights organizations, large tech companies and others using GrapheneOS weren’t included. Our response was in English was translated by them: “we have no clients or customers” was turned into “nous n’avons ni clients ni usagers”, etc…
GrapheneOS is a freely available open source privacy project. It’s obtained from our website, not shady dealers in dark alleys and the “dark web”. It doesn’t have a marketing budget and we certainly aren’t promoting it through unlisted YouTube channels and the other nonsense that’s being claimed.
GrapheneOS has no such thing as the fake Snapchat feature that’s described. What they’re describing appears to be forks of GrapheneOS by shady companies infringing on our trademark. Those products may not even be truly based on GrapheneOS, similar to how ANOM used parts of it to pass it off as such.
France is an increasingly authoritarian country on the brink of it getting far worse. They’re already very strong supporters of EU Chat Control. Their fascist law enforcement is clearly ahead of the game pushing outrageous false claims about open source privacy projects. None of it is substantiated.
iodéOS and /e/OS are based in France. iodéOS and /e/OS make devices dramatically more vulnerable while misleading users about privacy and security. These fake privacy products serve the interest of authoritarians rather than protecting people. /e/OS receives millions of euros in government funding.
Those lag many months to years behind on providing standard Android privacy and security patches. They heavily encourage users to use devices without working disk encryption and important security protections. Their users have their data up for grabs by apps, services and governments who want it.
There’s a reason they’re going after a legitimate privacy and security project developed outside of their jurisdiction rather than 2 companies based in France within their reach profiting from selling ‘privacy’ products.
Here’s that article:
So, will this get published in a “corrections” section at the back of the paper that nobody reads, or will Le Parisien ignore it entirely?
These days probably ignore it entirely. There’s no reputation consequences anymore.
