As many of you may know, Murena, the makers of /e/OS, have made the utterly inexplicable decision to integrate OpenAI into /e/ directly. Normally I would write this off as just another open source project betrayed for profit and move on to another ROM, but Fairphone’s close collaboration with them gives me some real concerns.
I’d like a statement from Fairphone regarding their partnership with Murena following this change. Does Fairphone support this decision? Was Fairphone aware of it before it happened? Does Fairphone intend to continue its relationship with Murena?
Thanks for the links, but ideally I’d like a comment from Fairphone on this specific issue. My concerns are entirely about privacy, and about Murena’s decision to send /e/OS users’ data to OpenAI as a core part of their OS.
And to be clear, I understand and agree with the decision for Fairphone and Murena both to support AI platforms. That’s necessary for the phone to be marketable, I get it. The problem is Murena building it directly into /e/OS themselves.
I will start to care once they are caught sending user voice recordings to OpenAI without user intention or consent. Then you would have a veritable scandal in my book. And they would be in trouble.
As it looks right now, you are not forced to use this feature. And even if you want to use this for whatever reasons, currently you first have to pay.
If it’s an App any user could most probably “uninstall” it (technically, disable it for user 0, rendering it unoperative, even through OS updates), but I’m not on /e/OS 3.0.x yet, and I’m not a Murena Workspace Premium user, so I can’t have a look yet.
I don’t intend to use voice to text with any cloud. I played around a bit with Dicio (which uses Vosk locally on-device), but while I find voice to text pretty interesting in the technical sense, personally I have real trouble to find a really compelling use case for me.
So, for the time being, I’ll watch this play out.
If Fairphone really felt the urge to say something to this all, I would be interested in that, too.
I am using murena ff4, and I recommended that to so several people, so they bought it, too. Because of it’s “privacy and anonymity out of the box”. Now this really pisses me off! Such things must be opt in!
Look: I bought me a murena phone (an out-of-the-box solution) because I don’t have much time! I want fairfone and murena do the nitty gritty research and decision making for my privacy. (And not against it because of some market-share-buiz-money bla - its FAIRfone not just any random company!) - have you forgotten your very own marketing campaigns?
I only accidentally stumbled over this information here and now need to check how to disable such features (on every update, too?) And now I am worried about how many other suchlike terrible changes/decisions I did not stumble over?
For everyone to understand: sending my personal voice to 3rd AI-business company is like sharing my very fingerprints with “anyone who might be interested in” - and no excuse by offering optional paid anonymizing service (how hack-prooven will it stay in the long term, anyways)
What is happening with your minds, dear decision makers?
While I am fetching the latest OS updates, it seems it is activated by default, so opt-out. Which would really be a nasty move! But lets wait to see by myself after latest update is installed.
At the end: tell Murena. There isnt much we Fairphone users can do here and I doubt FP has any influence either.
The word Fair in Fairphone is not related to your privacy, its related to fair treatment and payment of those building the phones for us under very bad conditions.
So now I was able to see for latest e/OS updates and it is 2.0-s-2025-0319477659-stable-FP4 Looking at the release notes, it is not yet the version with VoiceToText AI stuff. Seems e/OS 3.0 will be the relevant one - not sure why it is not offered yet as update for ff4.
At the end: tell Murena.
Jo, that is actually true.
The word Fair in Fairphone is not related to your privacy, its related to fair treatment and payment of those building the phones for us under very bad conditions.
I really disagree! I was bought into buying and recommending Fairphones by a marketing campaign that covered both areas. And I strongly advise: you do not want to repel a huge customer base in e.g. Germany by Motte-and-bailey fallacy - Wikipedia ! Fairfone was also introduced to us as a new (morally better) possibility to evade the few bad big corps. Explicitly naming unasked data hoarding and privacy ignoring corps.
So to defeat your position by providing at least one strict argument: Your reductionists interpretation of fair cannot be “THE TRUTH”, because fairfone itself (not murena only) explicitly is marketing fresh of out-of-box de-googled Murena phones, because fair is meant quite broader! So please, stop using your narrow interpretation of fair from now on.
Reduce interpretation of “fair” too much, and you’ll end loosing customers faith.
tverr, could you please explain why you think that what yvmuell did is an example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy? I find that a bit far-fetched and actually a way to discourage people from trying to help.
Sure! I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying to help, but maybe I did? It was exactly this part that remembered me to that motte-and-bailey fallacy thing:
re-reading, now the german version, shows what I wanted to express, no intent to offend on my side: “indem er diese Position mit einer abgeschwächten oder möglicherweise nur bedeutungsähnlichen Version davon gleichsetzt, was dann in aller Regel als Richtig- oder Klarstellung deklariert wird.”
Then I tried to explain what exactly I meant, again as gist:
Reduce interpretation of “fair” too much, and you’ll end loosing customers faith.
So if OP was offended by my words, please say so and please take my apologies, I mean no harm!
Indeed. /e/OS 2.0 was released in May 2024.
The build date of this 2.0-S build is new, because a lot of old builds were gone with an epic server outage. But as some old builds are necessary as a step inbetween to enable a device to upgrade from a really old OS version to a current one, Murena rebuilt them with a new timestamp … /e/OS official FP4 download
Your updater says it can update or upgrade to 2.0-S?
Once there, this should then be upgradable to Android 13 (T).
And once there, this should then be upgradable to Android 14 (U).
→ I have 2.0-s-2025-0319477659-stable-FP4
→ Oh no! I the updater does say “it is the newest version already!” And there is no further option.
→ I will have to dive into that asap! argl. Not sure what to do.
You could try whether clearing cache and storage of the Updater App helps.
Settings - Apps - See all … apps - (three dot menu at the top right) - Show system - Updater (or the localised name for it in your system language) - Storage and cache
Remember to backup all your important stuff to somewhere safe before any update/upgrade.
I totally agree with this. You just cant anonimyze this, at least not effectively, maybe in “business-speak”, like how all the data mining companies claim to “anonymize” the data they share with their 723 Business Partners. Theres so many things in the sound of a person talking that can be analyzed to make them identifiable, across both the future and past voice samples they have transcribed, and also samples that OpenAI may obtain from other sources. And then theres also the content of the voice samples.
Unfortunately however, as a participant in a conversation I have hardly a say in whether the other party can basically upload our conversation to OpenAI. Of course that needs to be agreed upon by the participants, but I cannot even determine if that is happening. Whats next, people will be uploading even what I send to them, to a TTS service run by whatever AI company, so that they have a full picture of the conversation? For the convenience of chatting while driving the car, of course. This is practically the same, or probably worse, as people running a sound recorder all day while going about their lives, without letting those around them know it. Going to work, shopping, riding the bus, attending some activity. That is illegal in a lot of countries.
We thought conversational privacy could be achievable with the right messaging apps, preferably encrypted, but it turns out either users are willingly installing data exfiltration services on their phones, negating any security measure a chat app can give, or possibly not too far into the future (not with Murena, but generally in the Android ecosystem) it is just preinstalled into people’s phones, running automatically, and they dont even know it or that they should remove it.
But of course, this is not a Murena problem, but much broader than that.
Unfortunately however, as a participant in a conversation I have hardly a say in whether the other party can basically upload our conversation to OpenAI. Of course that needs to be agreed upon by the participants, but I cannot even determine if that is happening
This is not specific to people using /e/OS but it is true for all of them.
