GrapheneOS Leaves France Over Privacy
French cloud outfit OVHcloud took another hit this week after GrapheneOS, a mobile operating system, said it was ditching the company’s servers over concerns about France’s approach to digital privacy.
The project posted on X (formerly Twitter): “We no longer have any active servers in France and are continuing the process of leaving OVH.”
“France isn’t a safe country for open source privacy projects,” the group explained. “They expect backdoors in encryption and for device access too. Secure devices and services are not going to be allowed.
“We don’t feel safe using OVH for even a static website with servers in Canada/US via their Canada/US subsidiaries.”
France is taking state actions against GrapheneOS. They’re conflating us with companies which they’ve previously gone after and taken over their servers. We aren’t vulnerable to being attacked in the same way but we still don’t want accesses to our website/network services being logged or our website being hijacked.
While the operating system will still be available to French users, all website and discussion servers are being relocated abroad.
Until now, the project relied on OVH Bearharnois, a French hosting provider, for its core website and social media services. The migration plan moves the Mastodon, Discourse, and Matrix instances to a combination of local and shared servers in Toronto. Critical website infrastructure will be hosted by Netcup, a German‑based company.
[…]
Citing the government’s support of the European Union Chat Control proposal, GrapheneOS developers are also refusing travel to France. Developers are no longer allowed to work inside the country due to safety concerns.
La Quadrature du Net (Apple translation, Hacker News):
Two articles in Le Parisien yesterday, followed today by an article in Le Figaro, launched a shameful offensive against GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system for phones, free and accessible to all. At La Quadrature, it is one of the tools that we favor and regularly recommend to protect ourselves from advertising tracking or spyware.
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.
[…]
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.
Previously:
- EU Council Approves New “Chat Control” Mandate
- Memory Integrity Enforcement
- France Rejects Backdoor Mandate
- Telegram Founder Arrested
- French Bill to Allow Police to Commandeer Phones
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Maybe not directly related but my only experience with OVH is blocking their entire IP range from my networks because they host tons of hacking bots.
Would be nice if the government of France cared as much about their infrastructure being abused for crime as they do abusing it for government surveillance.
