That indicator and the permission system are provided by the OS on your phone. If you trust your OEM not to abuse it, then it works. If the company that made your device is facebook, neither of those features prevent facebook from listening in 24/7.
That indicator and the permission system are provided by the OS on your phone. If you trust your OEM not to abuse it, then it works. If the company that made your device is facebook, neither of those features prevent facebook from listening in 24/7.
His activity on GrapheneOS repositories, issues, etc. indicates he’s still very active in development and in the community.
is clearly on the spectrum in some way
This is not an excuse to behave the way he does.
Very good decision from him to withdraw from social media
He hasn’t, still on github, still on HN.
“Limited patience” is understandable, but the behavior of the GrapheneOS dev is completely different. I’ve personally interacted with them not too long ago, and nothing has changed since the public accusations from a year ago.
Lead dev of grapheneos is extremely toxic in communication. I don’t trust someone like that developing the software running on a phone.
EDIT: This comment seems to be particularly controversial, with many people praising GrapheneOS as a project, while ignoring the developers views and actions. Although my opinion of the main developer is negative, the project itself and its goals are great. To clear up some confusion, I want to add to my previous statement:
At first, this seems like the standard “separating art from the artist”, however, GrapheneOS is a ton of code, not just art. When it comes to other forms of art, like literature or paintings, an artist maliciously hiding their personal beliefs in their otherwise “unbiased” work might degrade the quality of the final result, but does not have much significant impact outside of that. When it comes to code, programs, OSes, this changes. The artist (programmer) changing their art (code) based on their personal beliefs is not just a degradation in quality, but a security risk for anyone running the code and trusting the developer. Having seen the way the GOS dev speaks about its community and even people in support of him (see Louis Rossman’s video), it becomes clear that the mentioned “risk” of malware is very much present. Like many others, I don’t have the time to verify the source code of an entire Android rom myself, which means I would have to trust the GOS dev to not insert anything malicious, after the statements he’s made. I’d have to trust him after he’s grouped a majority of his community into “people who are after him and are swatting him”. It’s a very real possibility that someone with beliefs like that would add malicious code to his project, and I’m personally not willing to run that risk.
Please note that I am not encouraging people to “go harass the dev”, that is an immoral action nobody should be doing. I am trying to inform people of the developers behavior online, past and current, so they can make a decision for themselves whether to run his software on their personal devices.
They do make other Android-based devices like the Meta Quest line of VR headsets, and Facebook was just an example, any other OEM fits in that statement as well, like Samsung, Google, OnePlus, etc.