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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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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