Apple and Google confirm governments spy on users through push notifications
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
What I don't understand is this: If the government wants to search your house, they show up at the door and show you a warrant. You can inspect the warrant - it's not secret. Granted, they're going to search your house anyway, but at least you know about it.
Except in truly extraordinary circumstances, you should be informed if your government has requested access to any of your private information.
This apparently goes even farther: not only have companies not been allowed to inform their customers, they haven't even been allowed to generally say that such information has ever been requested about anyone. That is seriously into dystopian territory.
SO why should electronic mail not have the same rules applied?
Even if the government has a warrant? The article you linked to seems to say the government can do it with a warrant:
>By law, first-class mail is sealed against inspection, meaning that government officials may not open it without first getting a warrant from a judge.
If not, then the notifications are at least as private from the government as first class mail.
While the problem is not understood, there is no chance of finding a proper solution.
As Nietzsche said:
A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."
It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.
Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.This data is not legally yours, since its not on equipment you own or rent.
If the same exact service was on property you owned or rented, they would need a warrant.
Speculating here, but if you paid for a service, and the terms of service were such that you had rental rights to the equipment and ownership of the data, then the US govt would need a warrant. But then the company would not be able to sell the data since it would actually be yours.
I'd pay for a service that was like that.
Email was like that, until Gmail ruined it and you can no longer run your own mail server without being blacklisted everywhere.
The Fediverse is kind of like this, except it's not really designed for private data; its primary use-case is publishing.
The most serious of secure messengers moved to push notifications that just cause the app to wake up and fetch the real message from the server to show as notification, but there are still plenty of apps that just send the full message as push notification.
You mean on-premises? If so, please show me where I can download and run my own APNS servers on my own hardware, because such a thing does not exist. You can run your own workers, which send through APNS/apple's servers, but there is no such way you can own the entire chain to get a push from your backends to a apple device, not if you're using native push notifications.
AFAIK, google isn't any better, with GCM, and even firebase use that from what I know.
They receive silent push notifications, which wake up the app (a reason for the entitlement being restricted). Once awake, the app takes over, managing the notification itself.
This approach circumvents sending notification content in cleartext through Apple's servers, thereby preserving their end-to-end encryption.
On the other hand, there is no universal one size fits all rule that makes society better. Especially because there are plenty of very different people, both good and bad, and no rule, however well-intentioned will work out great overall. Let's hope someone at some point does come up with a better solution.
In observation on why push messages: the same reason any other real-time communication is interesting, like calls, SMS, MMS, because that's enough bits being transceived, or enough of a cell location to find out where a device is, while not being long enough that you get some 'on the move' smear.
These concerns are not unique to government. Don't trust any third party with your data. Security 101
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
This still seems like something that could be fixed with smarter design without losing functionality.. e.g. decoupling device registrations from push channels, and treating the push channel ID a particular device is using as toxic for sharing and intermingling as other kinds of personal identifiers like phone numbers, including with the OS provider itself, or creating a unique push channel ID for every app registration, etc.
P2P mobile applications cannot wake themselves up to sync with peers (short of relying on exploits).
The same is true of browser service workers.
The architectures I’ve explored for mobile and web based P2P apps, they’ve all needed a central trusted push notification server fallback to wake up the process so it can check for messages.
Even then the APIs will fight you.
Unless the fallback server syncs for you, it can only wake you up on an interval. It can’t know if there is a notification worthy event for you to sync.
If you wake up the process and there are no messages from its peers that generate a notification, you “consume” some of your background notification budget.
Consume too much and the system stops waking your app on push events, so you stop syncing in the background.
This method enables them to bypass the need for sending clear text content through Apple's servers, upholding their end-to-end encryption.
However, this practice can slightly impact battery consumption, which is probably why this specific entitlement is not freely available to all apps. It's a balance between enhanced security and a marginal increase in battery usage.
I self-host Gotify, which just uses a websocket for the push part, and battery consumption is only 2%/day even with the app white listed from "optimization"