• Edited whoisdanny (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/22) Political discussion is only allowed if it's very directly relevant to GrapheneOS. Carrousel7956 (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/24) /r/privacy moderators are incredibly hostile towards GrapheneOS. They strictly ban discussing GrapheneOS or even mentioning it. The thread didn't explicitly mention GrapheneOS in the title or body as text so it wasn't automatically removed. Their rule is written as a ban on discussing alternative mobile operating systems but it was specifically targeted against GrapheneOS and is only strictly enforced for GrapheneOS. The ban on discussing it exists because the moderators are hostile towards our team and actively participate in attacks on us including making vile personal attacks and libelous claims. Many of our users have been banned from /r/privacy for voicing support for GrapheneOS, countering false claims about it or simply trying to discuss it. The subreddit should be taken away from the current mods and given to people who support privacy and legitimate privacy projects instead of power tripping mods abusing their position for years to harm an open source privacy project. It's not all that much different from this company's customer support being abusive towards our users which is probably not what they've actually been told to do but some of them like abusing the tiny bit of power they have over people. Gamers of all people should have a way to show the middle finger to these practices. Get a PC, wait for the crack, and don't let those companies earn a dime until they either understand or go out of business. But no, here we are with invasive DRMs, always online single player, rootkits running on kernel level and now this. And still apologists will defend it. I remember times where you could go to a games store, buy a boxed game with cache and that's it. No one needed to know anything else about you to play a stupid game - as it should be. Byku (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/27) when Vanguard is eventually breached (not if, when) then you would hope to see a change in attitude but most normies are too far gone not even that would do it. • Edited Byku (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/27) But no, here we are with invasive DRMs, always online single player, rootkits running on kernel level and now this. Totally off topic and tl;dr, but you know there are online shops, such as GOG, specifically selling games that are DRM-free and possible to run on computers without internet. Support them, and you are supporting game developers that are friendly! You get an installation exe file that is yours to keep forever. Many Steam games work fine too after uninstalling Steam and disconnecting internet, but it is a hit and miss. And you can always refund a game if it turns out to not work without Steam installed and internet connected. I mean, unless the shop page says internet is required or the game has DRM, because sometimes they label that so you know what to avoid. JacksWendel (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/34) WHO THINKS ALL THIS IS NORMAL SHOULD BE LOCKED UP IN A MENTAL JAIL AND SEEK APROPRIATE TREATMENT. I think the GrapheneOS user forum's intended focus is helping people use GrapheneOS, rather than making claims about people needing mental health treatment. GrapheneOS (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/26) May you suggest alternatives to reddit? We all know it is a censorship shithole. Byku (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/27) 100% agree with you. Is there a way to DM someone in this forum? Thought you might be a cool guy to chat with. de0u (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/35) I wrote this for the other individuals who will certainly also take a note of this thread, let them see it. I have removed some posts above because it was just ranting. I understand some of you people feel strongly about the subject but this is not the place for it. Let's be more liberal about people's decisions going forward. JacksWendel (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/37) I guess it depends on the subreddit, but in my experience most are pretty terrible. For privacy there's discuss.privacyguides.net and ofc this forum. I think you're set for privacy content with those two and then also GOS has other places like the discord which is good. Hacker News is pretty good and really active it has really good moderation. It's got a lot of programming but privacy topics/freedom come to the frontpage very often. Anything intellectually stimulating can be discussed. It goes by fast so it's not really for long discussions. Make sure to follow the rules it's very strict about not being rude, etc. It's about news as the name implies. You can try this extension orange juice for HN if you want to improve the theme or there's others like modern for HN. In chromewebstore and probably firefox as well. One thing about HN is there's a great diversity of opinions because you got tech CEOs to artists because there's no silos. The moderator is really good as I said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 There's also Monero.forum for Monero talk and I think it's on the up and up. The Monero reddit is pretty terrible. Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about a member of Yoti's support team reporting a GrapheneOS user to authorities. Today, we received an email from a top member of their organization telling us that they believe the screenshots of the exchange to be fabricated. They assure us that they couldn't find record of the email and "would never report any user to the police or any other third party based on their choice of operating system or device." They also said they will be speaking to engineers on their end to see if there are any reasons for GrapheneOS users to experience issues with their age verification system. Although we have seen members of the community reporting issues with the app, we hope that these issues can be addressed soon. GOS should make app that we can use to make our phones look like apple phone or Samsung. We just turn it on when need it. • Edited dj777 (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/43) That is the thing I've read this week. dj777 (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/43) There's no feasible way to pretend to have different hardware or a different OS. Hardware attestation exists and prevents that in the general case. Even without hardware attestation, there are an enormous number of ways for an app to identify the OS and device model. They can simply look at their own memory to identify the OS based on the OS libraries loaded in the app among many other ways to do it. To hide that it's GrapheneOS, privacy and security would need to be greatly reduced by removing any protections beyond what the stock OS provides which are visible to apps. The stock OS builds of libraries and anything else apps can see would need to be used. It would pretty much rule out building an OS from source especially with a lot of changes. If you want the device to appear to be running the stock OS, then you need to be using the stock OS. It's feasible to make a rootkit for the stock OS which hides itself well enough to make some changes while not having apps realize it isn't the stock OS unless they use hardware attestation but even the Play Integrity device integrity level uses hardware attestation and would detect it without tricking it into believing it's another device without hardware attestation. That will get harder and harder to do until they finally drop support for not using hardware attestation. You don't actually want this. There's no feasible way to pretend to have different hardware or a different OS. What about at the service provider level, just to minimise undue scrutiny in the first place (I've got the recent French precedent in mind here) ? Would that even be useful ? What about spoofing or isolating the OS's identity for a single app (say, Russia's MAX) ? orydeatemi (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/46) What about spoofing or isolating the OS's identity for a single app (say, Russia's MAX) ? What will that achieve? Does it behave differently on GOS than any other Android? If an app wants to run only on "certified" hardware, they can simply check for Google's MEETS_STRONG_INTEGRITY API like banking apps do. Messengers don't care if you run GOS or not, they just don't want you to run them on rooted devices / emulators. orydeatemi (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/46) If you don't want connections to identify you as using GrapheneOS then you need the combination of changing connectivity checks to Google from GrapheneOS and using a VPN. If you can't use a VPN then it's impractical to hide which apps and OS you're using from an ISP if they try to detect it. It's technically possible to disable the default connections but isn't a good idea and the absence of connections can also still be used to infer that it's not Google Mobile Services Android which is why Google for connectivity checks is stealthier than Disabled. Disabling connectivity checks also loses the important functionality detecting when internet access is working and detecting captive portals to handle those with the OS captive portal app not requiring disabling the VPN or using another profile to deal with it. Offering the option to disable connectivity checks is mainly just for completeness since some users want it rather than being recommended. • 4 days ago (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos?page=3) Post #49 Saturday, June 13, 2026 5:08 AM GrapheneOS (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/45) So any app with competent devs can find out what OS someone is using? I guess it would make sense to have government apps on a second phone • 4 days ago (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos?page=3) Post #50 Saturday, June 13, 2026 6:05 AM HuIk (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/49) So any app with competent devs can find out what OS someone is using? Incompetent dev here. This will be fairly enough to read the screen resolution, CPU model, pixel density, amount of RAM and storage, match it against a database like gsmarena and you have a solid fingerprint even if the device model build IDs and other software identifiers are spoofed. Government apps don't need to use these tactics, simply because this data by itself doesn't have any meaningful value. Law enforcement can request your IMEI from the carrier, which provides much more information about the device, such as color and when it was activated. • 4 days ago (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos?page=3) Post #51 Saturday, June 13, 2026 6:39 AM • 4 days ago (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos?page=3) Post #52 Saturday, June 13, 2026 12:08 PM 23Sha-ger (https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36134-grapheneos-user-reported-to-authorities-for-using-grapheneos/50) Yeah but that's hardware, I was wondering about software; though only Pixels support GOS at the moment, only a small percentage of owners actually use GOS.