GrapheneOS fires back at Gaël Duval over “phone for pedophiles” remark amid Motorola deal

GrapheneOS is back in the headlines, and once again, it is not because of a quiet feature update or some boring changelog nobody reads unless they need insomnia treatment. This latest flare-up centers on a video interview that GrapheneOS shared while calling out Gaël Duval, the founder and president of the /e/ Foundation and CEO of Murena.

According to GrapheneOS, Duval once again drew a line between /e/’s privacy pitch and hardened security, framing the latter as the sort of thing only pedophiles, spies, or other bad actors would need. That is an extraordinary implication in any context, but it lands even harder now that GrapheneOS is publicly tied to Motorola for future privacy-focused phones.

From where I sit, having followed this saga for months, that is the real story here. Not just that a rival project boss said something inflammatory, but that the old smear appears to be back in a more explicit form. Privacy phones are not bought only by criminals, and it is ridiculous that this even needs repeating in 2026. People choose platforms like GrapheneOS for the same reason they lock their doors, use 2FA, or hate random apps vacuuming up their lives for ad-tech mulch. Treating exploit protection like a confession of guilt is the kind of logic that would make a CCTV salesman accuse anyone with curtains of plotting a felony.

What makes this episode more interesting is how neatly it fits into the trail I have been documenting. Just days ago, I covered GrapheneOS refusing to comply with Brazil’s age-verification rules, which would require camera-based third-party ID checks and tokenized age verification at the OS level. Before that, I reported on GrapheneOS explaining how Google’s changing Android development model helped push it toward a long-term Motorola partnership, with the first official non-Pixel device not expected until 2027. In other words, GrapheneOS is no longer just a Pixel-only curiosity for privacy diehards. It is expanding, and the rhetoric around it is getting hotter right alongside that expansion.

That is also why this feels like a continuation, not a fresh incident. Back in November, I reported on GrapheneOS slamming an unnamed “small company” over “misinformation & libel attacks” after a failed partnership. A few days later, in the middle of the France drama, GrapheneOS publicly speculated that Murena and/or iodé may be involved in pushing the broader anti-GrapheneOS narrative, while stopping short of presenting hard proof. This latest development does not suddenly prove every older suspicion, obviously, but it does make the Murena angle look much less like internet conspiracy corkboard stuff and much more like a long-simmering industry feud finally speaking in plain language.

The French backdrop matters here too. Last November, Le Parisien published reports linking GrapheneOS and Google Pixel phones to narcotraffickers after police reportedly failed to access one device. That coverage helped fuel the now-familiar framing of GrapheneOS as a tool for criminals rather than as a hardened mobile OS built to resist exploitation and unauthorized data extraction.

GrapheneOS has spent months arguing that this narrative is inaccurate, politically useful to anti-encryption voices, and enthusiastically amplified by people who would rather sell privacy as branding than security as engineering.

To be fair, /e/ and Murena do not market themselves as hardened-security projects in the same way GrapheneOS does. Their own material frames /e/OS as a privacy-by-design, user-friendly, de-Googled Android experience, and /e/ openly says the project is forked from LineageOS and focuses more on end-user experience than hardware. That distinction is worth keeping in view. But the problem for Duval is that there is a massive difference between saying “we prioritize usability” and implying that serious exploit mitigation is mainly for pedophiles and spies. One is a product philosophy. The other is a smear.

At this point, the masks are off. What GrapheneOS had previously described as sabotage and misinformation from a vaguely defined rival now has a much clearer face attached to it, at least in the project’s view. And for anyone still wondering why this matters, it is simple: once privacy and security tools start being framed as suspicious by default, everybody loses except the people who benefit from weaker devices and softer targets.

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