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  • Response to dishonest attacks on the GrapheneOS project by Robert Braxman

basedFOSS He is not someone who is trying to give advice to protect the privacy but makes mistakes or is misinformed, no, he wants to sell you a sensational stories and get you to buy his horrible products in return as a solution, he makes money with his lies and he is far from alone, why ? Because there are paranoid people who think that all their devices can be magically hacked and who think they're being tracked H24, Braxman targets this kind of people, tells them what they want to hear and then offers snake oil for one purpose only, to make money.

basedFOSS I’d love to see the privacy & security come back together and stop fighting each other…

Here, it's not a battle between security and privacty, both of which are absent from Braxman's work.

      GrapheneOS It's sad that this needs to be done, but I appreciate your time and courage to do it anyway. 💪

        GrapheneOS Sure, he is a scammer and things have to be said in a way that people get the message. Yet preferrably in a polite way.

        (I meant it in a more broader and a social way.) The reaction of people like him when being critisized will be more false accusations and hostility... it will go down a rabbit hole fighting each other on who said what and did this or that first. (That's a pattern I recognized which must not be true, just my perception)

        I think you did quite well achieve a professional tone. As a strategy you could have targeted privacy & security scammers in general and make him and others an example of it. So then it's you vs a problem and not people. I think you get the point.

        Thanks for your great work and...
        Community members: Donate if you are financially in the position

        Just wanted to leave behind some nice words in this time of hate :)

        GrapheneOS

            I understand that a ML component may not phone home and just acts as an API. I rarely use photos or videos or download anything. I still do not want machine learning to locally classify my files through API. If there is an exploit, all my files could be pre-classified by API calls by an App (in a worst case scenario) for an attacker to easily exfiltrate what is most economically or otherwise damaging. I don't know if information about files will be stored anywhere. This increases my attack surface (not of being hacked but for easy data exfiltration) even if sandboxeded if I am not making sure there are no API calls and I don't care if someone texts me a naked picture so I have no use case for it. Is there an option in GOS to delete this? I don't care about ML models being on the device, I care about an accessible API that I may be oblivious to or does stuff and I'm too stupid to realize it's classified everything and stored metadata somewhere. I don't want to have to think about this. I doubt I am notified if there's an API call and can't read the code for all my Apps.

            I'm sure the person's video was misleading, but it should be fine for people to be aware of this without being hysterical or irrational about it's limited impact.

              I too am aware of Braxman and his continuous nonsense. I watched a few of his videos back in the day. Fortunately they were not very technical and led me to actually valuable information along the way, when I started researching further. He sadly is technically savvy enough to develop products himself that he can sell to his audience, but not savvy enough to actually understand the technical intricacies of the subjects he's talking about. I would go as far as calling him the Steven Seagal of the privacy and security community.

              However, the only way forward is to make sure that actually knowledgeable members call him out by exploiting the same mechanisms he does. Social media and SEO is an even playing field that can be used by anyone to reach an infinite amount of people.

              If you decide to make others aware of his misinformation, make sure to keep it in a professional manner. No name calling, no accusations. Just provide a technical analysis of his claims and disprove them. It's an uphill battle that can't be won any other way sadly.
              If you are a journalist or can reach one, this would also create a big splash. You would be surprised how much impact traditional media has. And it certainly makes for a good story too.

              Tl;dr: don't overthink it. He will be exposed sooner or later anyway and justice will be served.

                angela That is not what this does in the first place. Read our post about it.

                  10 days later