“App developers can encrypt these messages when they’re stored (in transit they’re protected by TLS) but the associated metadata – the app receiving the notification, the time stamp, and network details – is not encrypted.”
Another quote from the article: “The data that is required to ‘turn on any push notification service’ is quite invasive and can unexpectedly reveal/track your location/store your movement with a third-party marketing company or one of the app stores, which is merely a court order or subpoena away from potentially exposing those personal details.”
How is getting a push notification any better at tracking someone than the actual gps and tower data that their phone is CONSTANTLY sending out to their cell providers?
Seems really overblown, like most people hearing this assume it’s including contents of the notifications but it doesn’t, and if law enforcement wants to put a suspect at a crime scene, they can just get the data from T-Mobile, if it gets to the point they’re asking Google or Apple for info, id be much more concerned about all the data and emails stored on the cloud, which they already have no problems giving out.
Am I missing something? What can law enforcement gain from push notification data that they can’t get with data from the cell provider already or the wealth of other data collected by Gmail, maps, Uber, etc, which is way more useful than anything a push notification would contain.
Not defending the practice of course, I don’t get push notifications because I don’t have Google apps installed on my grapheneOS phone, but I’m pretty sure T-Mobile knows my location just as well.
I think the whole thing is that it’s a class of data that has very few privacy protections on it and is therefore more easily accessible by assholes
And of course nobody is going to fix these vulnerabilities because the governments want to be able to view that data
The fix would be very easy. Just don’t store that data. But Google and Apple obviously want that data for themselves as well, for advertising.
Tbh I absolutely do not understand why they decided to collect any data for push notifications in the first place. But yea now nobody will fix it. Though I’m wondering if it’s only the proprietary part (Firebase or whatever the name is) or the system itself that collects data. I mean if I use a degoogled phone that doesn’t even have that proprietary part (means notifications from IMSes don’t work either), am I safe from this or not? And does the collected data go to Google or to the app’s developers?
I already explained how the whole push notification thing works in this comment. If you’re using a degoogled phone, you’ll be fine. MicroG has the option to use Firebase but you need to be logged in with a Google account, enable device registration and enable cloud messaging for it to use it. Google has the data about when you got a push notification from what app since it goes through their server and the app developer can obviously log the notification data from their app.
BRUH push notifications with Firebase require everything going through a Google server? What in the deleted is that design?
I don’t like Google either but this design makes perfect sense. There’s a reason UnifiedPush works the same way. It sucks that you can’t choose a different server but that’s just how Google does things.
In my opinion there’s absolutely no point in sending notifications through Google. It can be done differently and in a much less overengineered way. Unification doesn’t make sense here. The additional features don’t work in half of the apps now anyways
If you have a better way to do this, I’d really like to hear it. Also, what additional features are you talking about?
