IdealisticCat629 Murena is a blatant scam and it's in no way bold to call it one. It's a strong consensus about people who have a clue about privacy and security. Here's a post we made for X explaining why:
/e/ is a highly problematic fork of LineageOS very poor privacy and atrocious security. People would be far better off using standard LineageOS one of the better supported devices. An iPhone is far more private and drastically more secure than Murena products.
/e/ lacks crucial standard privacy and security patches. It has many months and even years of delays to provide those. Nearly all the devices they support lack most Linux kernel, driver and firmware updates. They don't keep up with those for any devices. They don't keep up with Android, Chromium or Linux security updates anywhere either. Many severe patched privacy and security vulnerabilities are left wide open for months and even years with /e/. They heavily mislead their users about what's patched and how long they take to ship it.
/e/ also doesn't provide important standard privacy or security protections. It lags years behind on providing the current generation protections and disables many of the most important ones. An operating system failing to protect against known privacy weaknesses does not have reasonable privacy.
/e/ includes their own privacy invasive services and sends user data to third party including OpenAI without consent. Despite how it's marketed, it includes many Google services with privileged integration into the OS. They have their own privacy invasive services including user tracking with unique identifiers in their update client.
Their own supposed privacy features are incredibly flawed and do not provide what they claim. A small list of blocked domains omitting everything used for useful functionality does not stop tracking by apps or services. It leaves the most privacy invasive behavior of apps and services intact and is trivially bypassed in multiple ways even for what it does cover. Apps and services only need to use the same domains for functionality as tracking to avoid it which is already largely what they do. Apps and services also already widely deploy bypasses for this naive domain-based filtering even for domains dedicated to tracking. /e/ would have you believe that a DNS blocklist is a game changing approach. There are better implementations including RethinkDNS available for use elsewhere.
More information:
https://community.e.foundation/t/voice-to-text-feature-using-open-ai/70509
https://codeberg.org/divested-mobile/divestos-website/raw/commit/c7447de50bc8fadd20a30d4cbf1dcd8cf14805a0/static/misc/e.txt
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-standard-privacysecurity-patches-and-protections-arent-private
/e/ and their for-profit company Murena have repeatedly pushed anti-privacy talking points from authoritarians claiming devices with strong privacy and security are for criminals and pedophiles. Here are 2 examples where Gaël Duval says that himself about privacy/security hardened devices in general:
https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2040887784253141142
https://clubic.com/actualite-604786-murena-e-os-interview.html
/e/ and Murena many of the same anti-privacy talking points as France's current government and national law enforcement. They've aligned themselves with authoritarians in the country where they're based instead of opposing it. There are dozens of examples where they falsely claim GrapheneOS are mainly useful to criminals and mainly used by criminals. That's more extreme than the claims by France's national law enforcement cracking down on secure devices. They've gone so far to align themselves with anti-privacy authoritarians that they're ahead of them.
Murena is a for-profit company with the founders and owners of it being the same people who run /e/. /e/ includes for-profit paid Murena services and is built for Murena to sell devices with it. Despite being made for profit, /e/ receives millions of euros in government funding from governments which have spent years cracking down on legitimate privacy products:
The European Union has subsidized us to the tune of several million for this project.
https://projets-libres.org/en/podcast/e-os-a-degoogled-android-gael-duval-e-foundation-murena/
/e/ makes it far easier to remotely take over devices, violate user privacy from apps and bypass encryption to extract all the data from a device. These are exactly the kinds of devices authoritarians opposed to privacy and security want people to be using. These devices are much less private and drastically less secure than iPhones but are duping people into paying them for it with false marketing. They're regressing privacy and security instead of advancing it.