https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2025/11/22/grapheneos-migrates-server-infrastructure-from-france-amid-police-intimidation-claims/

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News Briefs GrapheneOS European Union

GrapheneOS migrates server infrastructure from France amid police
intimidation claims

GrapheneOS migrates server infrastructure from France amid police
intimidation claims November 22, 2025
By: Kevin Pham Kevin Pham

The GrapheneOS project has announced on X that they are ceasing all
operations in France, asserting that the country is no longer safe
for "open source privacy projects".

While the operating system will still be available to French users,
all website and discussion servers are being relocated abroad.

Until now, the project relied on OVH Bearharnois, a French hosting
provider, for its core website and social media services. The
migration plan moves the Mastodon, Discourse, and Matrix instances to
a combination of local and shared servers in Toronto. Critical
website infrastructure will be hosted by Netcup, a German-based
company.

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GrapheneOS claims that they does not collect confidential user data
in their servers or store critical infrastructure in France.
Therefore, the migration does not affect services such as signature
verification and downgrade protection for updates.

Citing the government's support of the European Union Chat Control
proposal, GrapheneOS developers are also refusing travel to France.
Developers are no longer allowed to work inside the country due to
safety concerns.

This decision was sparked by negative press coverage from two
articles published by Le Parisien. An interview with French
cybercrime prosecutor Johanna Brousse implies potential legal action
against the project:

    "With this new tool, there is real legitimacy for a certain
    portion of users in the desire to protect their exchanges. The
    approach is therefore different. But that won't stop us from
    suing the publishers if links are discovered with a criminal
    organization and they don't cooperate with the law"

GrapheneOS argues that Le Parisien have conflated their project with
government-sponsored forks, which are fake copies of their operating
system. The news outlet refers to a fake Snapchat app, dark web
advertising, and a series of unlisted YouTube videos that are not
features of GrapheneOS itself.

The project had previously threatened litigation against these
government-sponsored forks. One prominent example is ANOM, an
FBI-backed shell company that developed a compromised Android
operating system and messaging platform as part of Operation Trojan
Horse from 2018 and 2021.

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