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Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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I don't see how that would prevent this at all.
What is being discussed here is governments compromising the push notification service on Apple's servers (and presumably Google's as well)
Sandboxing Google services on your phone does nothing to change the fact that virtually all apps that receive messages/notifications are going to be using the push notification APIs that are compromised.
Whether or not private data is sent in those pushes and whether or not they are encrypted is up to the app developers.
It's common for push messages to simply be used as a triggering mechanism to tell the device to download the message securely so much of what is compromised in those cases will simply be done metadata or even just "a new message is available"
But even so, that information could be used to link your device to data they acquired using other methods based on the timing of the push and subsequent download or "pull"
The problem is that if you go ahead and disable push notifications/only use apps that allow you to, you are going to have abysmal battery life and an increase in data use because your phone will have to constantly ping cloud servers asking if new messages/notifications are available.
That's cool, but also doesn't sound all that useful.
A fairly significant number of apps depends on Firebase and the like and don't even have the option to pull notifications otherwise. And virtually every app at least use them.
When's the last time you've seen a chat app that didn't require push notifications to function? Even Signal uses them. (Though they do so in a way that doesn't expose any private data)
You just can't disable push without severely crippling the experience.
Further I'm not even sure disabling them on-device will change anything at all about governments being able to surveil them server-side. Afaik you are only stopping your phone from receiving them, they would still be sent to the Firebase server from the app's cloud servers.
I don't think this issue is avoidable other than app developers not using (or using in a secure manner) Firebase or GCM (or ACM) etc
Signal notifications work fine without GCM, and even Whatsapp does to an extent
That's true, signal is pretty good about that.
I wasn't saying Signal required them necessarily, just that even it uses them. But now reading back through my comment I can see how that could be easily misinterpreted. My bad
Yeah you're right. Sandboxed gplay services can still be used to surveil clients, good thing you can use another profile with gplay services and install apps (which needs those) on there, meaning no potential leaks for apps that use their own push notification service and closed APIs (Google or Firebase). Good thread about it: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/9407-this-is-why-i-use-grapheneos
Would applications that don't use GMS be compromised too? Example: everything from F-droid
I think unless they use netfy or a similar alternative then yes.
The vast majority of apps will be using GCM or FCM for notifications.
Now whether or not those push messages are encrypted/don't contain private data is up to the app developer so how much is exposed can certainly vary.
I get it. ~~Indeed, it's obvious now that even these apps would need to use Google's API~~ I stand corrected. Nope, apps from F-droid usually do not use GCM.
I hadn't heard of netfy before this, I'll have to take a look. I'm assuming that's an alternative FOSS framework for notifications? Can it be used as a drop-in replacement for most applications?
You're right, for some reason I thought Firebase was allowed.
Yeah netfy is a FOSS notification service.
As to drop-in replacements, I don't think such a thing really exists on the user side, this is fully up to the app developer in how they want to implement notifications.
To use netfy instead of FCM your app would need to be designed to do so or support it as an alternative option.