Received notice of a change to the service in my inbox today. Seems icky to me.
Devices in the network use Bluetooth to scan for nearby items. If other devices detect your items, they’ll securely send the locations where the items were detected to Find My Device. Your Android devices will do the same to help others find their offline items when detected nearby
Your devices’ locations will be encrypted using the PIN, pattern, or password for your Android devices. They can only be seen by you and those you share your devices with in Find My Device. They will not be visible to Google or used for other purposes.
GrapheneOS officially supports and encourages the use of Google Play Services and a Google account for “security” purposes. Their “unofficial” members also spread propaganda advocating for the same.
https://i.imgur.com/bUdVCpH.jpg
They are also an embargo partner with Google for security patches, and add features that may threaten the lives of privacy users, or end up in jail or death in certain circumstances.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220829223401/https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1564322206414524420#m
https://old.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/pjl4bh/what_is_your_opinion_of_grapheneos_conforming_to/
Is DivestOS any better in this respect?
There is defiance against Google services for sure. DivestOS is quite a lot better in that the motivations are fairly honest, and Tad is not catering to Pixels only. However, he has a different type of problem, in that he has done a bit of soul selling to the disgusting Daniel Micay. The situation is complicated, so let me simplify it. Micay’s code is not truly open source, but rather only usable if one worships Micay, and if someone were to even lift a finger to criticise, he will label them with epithets, harass them and unleash his rabid GrapheneOS social media army upon them. Sounds wild? It happened to FlorisBoard and Bromite projects, both of which are no longer developed.
Micay in realtime, in DivestOS’ XMPP chatroom, was accusing me of the typical “harassment ringleader campaign” BS, and ordered DivestOS/Mull developer (these are his aliases) SubZer0Carnage/Tad/SkewedZeppelin that if I was not banned immediately, DivestOS and him would face social media targeted campaign and DivestOS will have to forcibly pull off any borrowed GrapheneOS code. DivestOS developer dusted his hands off me.
https://i.imgur.com/Al65uTZ.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/mT8W9pa.jpg
For obvious reasons, I stopped using Mull and switched to Firefox mainline browser with uBlock Origin. I will never touch stuff that Micay or Tad has created or forked, unless other good developers have a strong oversight on them.