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by dataflow 363 days ago
Aren't push notifications logged and used for getting people's data? This was in the news over a year ago: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-push-notification-s...
2 comments

In general, all your personal information stored with Google or Apple or any other American company is subject to getting requested by a court order. If you listen to any of the True Crime podcasts, you'll always hear how google searches and cell tower location are always presented in a trial as evidence. People here always think they are so smart saying

> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who made that search query.

> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who had that cellphone around that cell tower. Could have been anybody. I could have been hacked.

Judges always allow those evidence and jury always views it as incriminating. What makes more sense, that some unknown hacker hacked into your account and googled something about the thing you're here for, or that you actually just googled it yourself?

I was on a jury where data like this harvested from Facebook pushed us beyond a reasonable doubt. There was just enough doubt to acquit or have a hung jury with only the physical evidence and eye witnesses. There was plenty of doubt with only the social media stuff. When you put all of it together, we reached a verdict pretty quickly.
When a CIA drone operator and their commander is behind the button, they give even less of a shit than a jury. No one will ever prosecute them.
Definitely, but they don't have to contain any (plaintext) message content for encrypted messengers.

On Android, push notifications were always processed by the receiving app, so it can just decrypt a payload directly (or download new messages from the server and decrypt these); on iOS, this isn't as reliable (e.g. swiping the app out of the app switcher used to break it in several iOS versions), but "VoIP notifications" and the newer "message decryption extension" [1] are.

The same principle applies to Web Push – I believe end-to-end encryption is even mandatory there.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...