GrapheneOS migrates server infrastructure from France amid police intimidation claims

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.

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.