And the secure “lockdown” mode on iOS disables push notifications for exactly this reason. But the vast majority of people don’t use lockdown mode in their day to day, because it kills a lot of the functionality of the phone. Lockdown mode is intended for people who may actually be targeted by laser-focused hacking attempts. Politicians, celebrities, people with high security clearance, etc… It’s not something that the average person would use.

Apple even publishes this as a known vulnerability. It’s due to the way push notifications work. Similar to SMS, push notifications default to unencrypted because there isn’t a single unified system. Each carrier and cell manufacturer handles push notifications differently, so they’re kept unencrypted so that the public encryption key doesn’t get lost during transit; That would just result in scrambled junk messages.

I got news for you. Google does this too. Have a great day.

Signal is E2EE. While it does use notifications, there is no meaningful unencrypted content in them. The content of the notification you see is decrypted on-device.

A push notification, from a technical standpoint, is just a way to wake up an app. It doesn’t have to contain any information.

So when you get a message, the messaging service sends a push notification through Apple/Google, which is a way of saying “Hey messaging app, wake up”. The app then starts running in the background on your phone, connects to it’s server, asks if there is anything new to know about, and the server tells it about a new message, if any. This can then generate a notification on your phone, but importantly what you are seeing in the notification did not come through Apple/Google, all that did was the “Hey messaging app, wake up!”.

If authorities then request this data from Apple/Google, all they can see is the times at which your messaging app was asked to wake up. Not whether any message was actually received, or what it contained, or from who. Because all that never touched Apple/Google’s systems, not even in an encrypted form.

That being said, some data can be sent directly through the Apple/Google system along with the wake up message, so it’s not impossible that some apps include some metadata there. In theory they shouldn’t. For example simple marketing notifications or ads often are just included with the push, because it’s simple to do.

Removed archive link, also paywalled.

:(

Articles Found:

1. https://m.slashdot.org/story/442846
2. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/
3. https://www.vice.com/en/article/apple-just-confirmed-governments-are-spying-on-peoples-phones-with-push-notifications/
4. https://www.imore.com/iphone/apple-admits-governments-can-spy-on-your-iphones-push-notifications-and-they-already-are
5. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surveil-push-notifications/
6. https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/06/04/apple-approved-fewer-push-data-personal-info-demands-in-2024-despite-government-surge

Edit:

1. Removed archived link, paywalled, signin required
2. Added articles on topic

Yes, these are not “private” services, they are “secure messaging” services. Commonly confused issue. Privacy requires controlling the communication infrastructure. Security only requires controlling the items being shared.

Selfhosted gotify rules

Does ntfy solve this problem?

Part of that is the responsibility of the app developer, since they define the payload that appears in the APNs push message. It’s possible for them to design it such that the push message really just says “time to ping your app server because something changed”. That minimizes the amount of data exposed to Apple, and therefore to law enforcement.

For instance the MDM protocol uses APNS. It tells the device that it’s time to reach out to the MDM server for new commands. The body of the message does not contain the commands.

That still necessarily reveals some metadata, like the fact that a message was sent to a device at a particular time. Often metadata is all that law enforcement wants for fishing expeditions. I think we should be pushing back on law enforcement’s use of broad requests (warrants?) for server data. We can and should minimize the data that servers have, but there’s limits. If servers can hold nothing, then we no longer have a functional Internet. Law enforcement shouldn’t feel entitled to all server data.

android vs linux: round 2 electric bugaloo

• android: comes preinstalled with google play services
• linux: comes preinstalled with whatever package manager your distro uses

Removed by mod