Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications
…both foreign and U.S. government agencies have been asking Apple and Google for metadata related to push notifications to, for example, help tie anonymous users of messaging apps to specific Apple or Google accounts.
In a statement, Apple said that Wyden's letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.
"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."
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Why are there no comments, and no real reactions to this here? At the moment there’s more traction around some rando thief story.
The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests but described them as democracies allied to the United States.
_The source said they did not know how long such information had been gathered in that way.
Most users give push notifications little thought, but they have occasionally attracted attention from technologists because of the difficulty of deploying them without sending data to Google or Apple._
Earlier this year French developer David Libeau said users and developers were often unaware of how their apps emitted data to the U.S. tech giants via push notifications, calling them "a privacy nightmare."_
Good question. I guess people are just lost for words
It’s pretty scary to be honest. On iOS there is no choice but to use Apple’s centralized severs. On Android there are options like UnifiedPush.