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Robert Braxman is a serial fabricator and scam artist. Braxman poorly parrots actual privacy and security information while mixing in lots of highly inaccurate information focused on promoting his insecure products and services. He also consistently attacks open source projects providing legitimate privacy and security tools including GrapheneOS, Signal and many others with false claims about both the technology and fabrications about the teams behind them. He's widely known to be a charlatan among actual privacy and security experts, but he has a significant following in privacy communities among non-technical people who don't know better. He loosely bases his content on real topics but fills it with a huge amount of highly inaccurate claims and outright fabrications. He tells people what they expect to hear and want to hear, while claiming he has the solutions to it through his products and services. The reality is that he's nothing but a scammer and is doing immense harm to the overall privacy movement. The misinformation he propagates directly harms people through them making bad choices and misunderstanding how privacy works. He creates a world full of fantasy issues and takes away attention from real problems.
Here's an example of the extreme level of scamming going on with his supposedly private/secure services:
https://www.reddit.com/r/privsec_dev/comments/132nb6b/fake_end_to_end_encryption_on_braxme/
Here's a recent example of him attacking GrapheneOS as part of spreading his usual fabrications about client side scanning:
https://x.com/rob_braxman/status/1892259882373431441
Here's a link to the accurate post Braxman is misrepresenting and spinning into us being shills trying to harm people's privacy:
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1888280836426084502
He does this all the time and we rarely ever address the misinformation he spreads about GrapheneOS on a regular basis.
Braxman's main approach to selling his meritless products and services is focusing on AI because it's what so many people are talking about. The real meaning of hardware support for AI is having the ability to do a bunch of math in parallel to accelerate neural networks. Having a powerful GPU with support for standard APIs is hardware support for AI. In Braxman's fantasy world, it means computer hardware thinking for itself and reporting people to the authorities on their own which is not something that exists in any common hardware. He latches onto anything to do with AI and heavily misrepresents it, particularly by misrepresenting entirely local features not even storing persistent state about what they see as being privacy threats.
Braxman propagates massive amounts of misinformation about many topics and isn't at all limited to talking about AI. He does this full time and it's unrealistic for anyone to go through all of it and debunk all of the utter nonsense he puts out. It's unfortunate that there aren't more experts debunking it because it's genuinely harming a lot of people. He's directly responsible for a large portion of misconceptions and misunderstandings in privacy communities which cause harm to people through them making choices which reduce their privacy and security rather than improving it. People getting duped into buying Braxman's products/services with poor privacy and security is only one of the ways he harms people. He has a very large negative impact on the overall privacy community and many legitimate privacy tools.
For Braxman's insecure devices, he's partnered with the founder of "Secure Group", a company closely resembling Encrochat, SkyECC, ANOM, etc. which then transitioned into closely partnering with Braxman via "The Good Phone Foundation" and "LUNR". They're also partnered with iodéOS, yet another insecure OS based on forking LineageOS which is presenting itself as a highly private and secure OS.
The devices sold by Braxman are made in partnership with Dominic Gingras, a long term grifter in the world of private and secure devices. He's the founder of Secure Group and the Good Phone Foundation. Dominic Gingras is similarly focused on earning money from selling people insecure products with false privacy and security marketing. He's likely the leading expert at ripping people off selling them insecure devices misrepresented as hardened. He has been doing it for 2 decades. He repeatedly tried to convince us to partner with him but he has never been truly interested in making secure devices and began spreading misinformation about GrapheneOS with Robert Braxman. Everything from these companies should be avoided at all costs. They're blatant scammers and are attacking many legitimate privacy and security products, not only GrapheneOS. Simply helping to legitimize one of the biggest scammers in the whole privacy space (Braxman) does massive harm in itself, but they do plenty to harm people themselves.
Braxman's attacks on GrapheneOS aren't limited to spreading technical misinformation. He regularly focuses on attacking the team behind it including supporting harassment content and fabricated stories about us. That includes Braxman supporting harassment from Kiwi Farms members. It's completely unacceptable behavior which should not be tolerated in the privacy and open source communities any longer. We strongly recommend doing serious research on Robert Braxman based on what actual privacy and security experts have to say about him and his products/services. Do not fall for his scams and the scams of the people partnering with him. It's easy to find this if you look for it.
We'll be publishing a more detailed article on our site with many examples of Braxman's fabrications and scamming in the future because he's a growing problem causing an increasing amount of harm to privacy communities and to GrapheneOS which has become one of his main targets for inaccurate attacks.
