In this video I discuss how a recent DOJ letter revealed that Apple and Google were sending peoples push notifications to foreign governments.
That’s why you should disable notifications for apps who shows sensitive information.
Signal does a good way of doing it they only signal (hehe) their app that their is a notification, then the apps gets this information itself.
You’d expect nothing less from Signal, but there’s still metadata left that can be quite useful.
They offer an alternative version for Android that uses a web socket, so not the best solution either, but oh well. I’d like to see them support UnifiedPush officially though. The Molly fork does, for instance.
A lot more elegant than a web socket, and if more apps supported it, you’d have less apps all running their own service in the background. Well, speaking for a degoogled system, where this would matter a lot more.
What metadata are you worried about specifically?
The simple information when you receive a notification for a specific app can be combined with a whole lot of other info about you that’s being collected by big tech and/or governments.
Time stamps are a surprisingly telling trail.
I mean sure, but realistically if you’re worried about the government knowing when you received a push notification you should be worried about your ISP or cell provider being able to provide that information as well. Hiding this metadata completely from the outside world is really hard. You can obfuscate it with garbage packets (e.g., signal could randomly send you push notifications when you don’t have any new messages giving you plausible deniability, or maybe signal could add some random delays to push notifications to make correlation of senders harder), or you can try to hide by not using push and connecting over Tor or something, but I’m not sure the government knowing when you connect to Tor is much better than them knowing when you receive a push notification, haha.
I’m personally not too worried about this particular metadata. I can imagine situations where it could be problematic (maybe you can use timing to guess whether two people are messaging each other), but I think it’s essentially the least valuable information you can leak from a messaging service, and I think mitigating against it isn’t super easy if you consider the whole network to be adversarial. There’s definitely things you can do, but they all have tradeoffs.
I want to add that WhatsApp doesn’t send message content within notifications either.
I know WhatsApp isn’t very popular around here (for valid reasons), but it uses end-to-end encryption, notifications or not.
it uses end-to-end encryption
At least they say they do, but we can’t really verify that.
Well they say they don’t but when the police wants insight on the conversations they will get it quick.
Fuck Facebook Fuck meta Fuck google Fuck Microsoft Fuck apple
What I wonder about is if the push notifications are ‘sent’ anyway, ie through the network and the phone just doesn’t do anything with them? Does anyone know?
Exactly. The issue is that the app still sends the notification to the cloud server. The cloud server doesn’t forward that notif to your device if you have notifs turned off, but it still gets sent to the server regardless. Which means it’s still subject to be shared with the government.
I want to add that WhatsApp doesn’t send message content within notifications either.
I know WhatsApp isn’t very popular around here (for valid reasons), but it uses end-to-end encryption, notifications or not.
I think leaders and elites are so out of touch they know nothing about us and have to rely on bad data to try and decipher what we want but wind up being stupid and just applying control measures because they’re not smart enough to just listen to our complaints.
They don’t give a fuck about you.
You are less than dog shit to them.
They don’t want to make your life better.
Fuck Google play services
Good thing I have push notifications off for fucking everything
The question is - are they off so they are not sent or are they off so you don’t see them? Sorry for tinfoil
So I don’t see em. Who needs em? Not me!
I think they are saying the notifications are still sent. They are going from the app servers to the push servers. From the push servers they COULD go to the Gov and to your phone. Your have the notifications turned off so they don’t go to your phone. Doesn’t mean they don’t get sent elsewhere though
Apple, privacy, my data, etc.
Is that why i dont get my notifications sometimes? /S
Not google proven. Just apple.
