For those who simply want the information:
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Stupid headlines like this, are making us collectively dumber.
Also, headline-type titles then "In this video I will waffle on for 20 minutes and give you one minute's worth of info
Yeah, I’m not clicking any link that starts with: odysee.com/@AlphaNerd:8
This is a good time to make aware that an alternative exists - UnifiedPush.
sadly not enough apps support it.
Which is why we need to spread awareness. People can't ask developers to consider it if they don't even know that it exists.
More people knowing about something is the first thing that needs to happen.
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.
I was wondering how Signal handles this. Thanks for the info.
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.
Based and never-trust-Facebook-pilled
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
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.
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?
Removing the notifications permission doesn't prevent them from being sent. Source
Awesome, thanks for the source!
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.
Why in the hell do push notifications need to be generated on google/apple servers? I'm sure our phones are more than capable of processing the information from the app to the lock screen.
The general design is a single system component wakes up the device when it’s sleeping (such as during screen off) and checks in with Apple/Google servers to see if there are any notifications.
Why?
Imagine if every app needed to wake up your device and make network requests to check for notifications etc. The more apps, the faster your battery drain as a queue of apps grows, constantly waking up your device to call home and check for notifications.
Hence Push Notification Services. Instead, developers send a notification to Apple/Google who then pool those notifications with notifications from other apps/developers. Then the single notification service on your device periodically wakes up the device and checks for notifications.
Additionally, push notification systems by OSs are designed with efficiency and minimal networks requests and bandwidth utilisation so an app can’t chew up user’s data quotas due to being poorly written.
TL;DR: It saves battery and network data, enabling users to use more apps.
App server > apple push server > app > lock screen.
For battery efficiency reasons it's better to use the apple push server that's hooked into ios rather than your own push server
It's the difference between polling notifications, where each app wakes up once a minute and goes to ask their respective servers if there are any new notifications, and push notifications which, as the name suggests, are pushed to your phone once they arrive so those apps can sleep.
Is that why i dont get my notifications sometimes? /S
I use Pushover for my own notifications and was curious to see if they had any info on this. Fortunately they've got a note on their page: https://blog.pushover.net/posts/2023/12/encryption
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
Fuck Google play services
Not google proven. Just apple.
Apple, privacy, my data, etc.
yea yea