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Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

• jruohonen 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • Ensorceled 3y ago
    I see that there is a lot of signal coming over my push notifications ... how would using this signal make spies incompetent?
    • jruohonen 3y ago
      > I see that there is a lot of signal What signals are you talking about? Someone tends to respond to Tinder's notifications at 6 PM on weekends, and such useless data?
      • popcalc 3y ago
        It would indicate that they're lonely and looking for a partner. If you were looking to turn them into an intelligence asset, you could have an officer approach and seduce them. If it's Grindr instead of Tinder, or if they're married, you have a blackmailing angle. In a lot of countries it would be very effective.
        • chatmasta 3y ago
          There's no need for notification snooping when these apps are spamming requests to unique subdomains on analytics services and their own APIs. DNS snooping is a much easier method of getting that metadata. Although I suppose one advantage of push notifications compared to DNS is that they're delivered even when the app isn't open, and more generally they can also serve as a liveness check (successful delivery means your device is online). Push notifications would be most valuable for p2p metadata (e.g. iMessage key exchange handshake between two users) and, to the degree they can snoop on the message content, obviously that would be valuable.
          • acdha 3y ago
            Just because some apps use insecure but highly identifiable DNS lookups doesn’t mean everyone does, or that DNS-over-HTTPS will never be deployed (iOS shipped support in 2020 and Android was only a couple of years later). There’s a 0% chance that anyone smart would say they should rely on that alone and not develop other sources for that information, and intelligence agencies have hired many smart technical people.
            • chatmasta 3y ago
              In general, I agree DNS-over-HTTPS is a step in the right direction, in terms of eliminating the low-hanging fruit of snooping over the wire. But it's still the same major companies providing the resolvers. And if you're sending them an NSL for push notifications, you may as well send one for DNS too.
              • acdha 3y ago
                That’s usually untrue - for example, if I’m on Comcast but I use Firefox, my DoH requests go instead to Cloudflare who don’t log IPs – but also the larger point is that DNS isn’t complete enough: sometimes it’s unique companies but a lot of the time it’s just a shared endpoint. Push notifications don’t have that problem and happen every time, not just when a cache expires.
                • chatmasta 3y ago
                  Cloudflare is one of the "major companies" I was alluding to. It's still an issue of centralized authorities that are accountable to governments. But I do trust Cloudflare more than my ISP or Apple, and in fact I route much of my traffic through them so I hope I'm right in giving them my trust.
                  • acdha 3y ago
                    It’s also a question of what information is available. In the United States, for example, it’s generally seemed to be the case that they can compel release of existing data but not changing systems to record new data or remove encryption. That’s not the case in every country, of course.
      • ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        Suppose you use an anonymous app for messaging. The government sees the conversation ("good day to you") but doesn't know who is on one side (perhaps both). So they ask Apple "who exactly sent or received on their phone a push notification for 'good day to you'?" Or perhaps "who sent or received push notifications from secure messaging app around 8:24:39.124 pm, 8:26:12.322, etc.?" Apple tells them, and now they know the identity of the "anonymous" recipient. Replace "good day to you" with any text disliked by any format or current or future government.
        • galad87 3y ago
          The content of almost every messaging app push notification is already encrypted. So I think it's mainly for knowing when someone receives a notification.
  • bmelton 3y ago
    In what way would ignoring a viable SIGINT source be incompetent? Just thinking about only my push notifications yesterday and they revealed that I am clearly a developer or technologist (push notifications from Git/AWS/etc), who got a haircut (time and location were revealed in the message, but I'm sure government-level agencies could have tracked which SportClips location the appointment belonged to), that I am interested in generative AI, and working out. Another day might have yielded far more interesting facts, but those bits added to a record of my interests and habits can become quite powerful over time.
    • jruohonen 3y ago
      > Just thinking about only my push notifications yesterday See, the gist in the letter is this sentence: "As with all of the other information these companies store for or about their users, because Apple and Google deliver push notification data, they can be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information." Do you really think that a foreign government is interested in push notifications when issuing a demand to disclose data from a phone?
      • mu53 3y ago
        Push notifications can leak information from secure or encrypted apps. Its easier to get around E2E encryption than breaking the encryption itself
      • bmelton 3y ago
        It seems silly to imagine they'd ask for anything less than everything they could get. More information means more ways to hone in on whatever allegation you're trying to prove. If it's investigative, then it gives more of a picture of what's happening. I used to imagine EZPass data as innocuous, but now it's used routinely in criminal trials to show that a defendant was at a given place at a given time. Divorce attorneys also request it, as it can be used to illustrate patterns.
• gafage 3y ago
  Both Apple and Google have root access in the devices. They do not necessarily need to do this.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    From the companies not needing this, it does not follow that various governments don't need this. My first thought is that this is looking like an especially fun (for the rest of us) popcorn session where someone in one government is shocked to discover that other governments pull the same stunts that they think should be reserved for "our people"… but then I looked up Senator Ron Wyden's Wikipedia page and he seems to be genuinely opposed to such shenanigans from everyone including the US. So, good for him.
• stuckinhell 3y ago
  Push notifications allow more people to spy on you. At the core most technologies have been deeply rooted by intelligence agencies.
• xattt 3y ago
  Do push notifications still get sent and just ignored if they are disabled on the device?
  • disposition2 3y ago
    I’m no expert but in my experience developing mobile applications & push notifications, I’ve only registered a device for notifications (and subsequently sent notifications) if the user opted in. Based on my own experience, I would say if you didn’t enable notifications for a particular service or app, they don’t get sent.
    • r1ch 3y ago
      The app developer will still send them to Apple / Google though so the data will still be available to snoop on.
      • wharvle 3y ago
        Dunno how it is now but it used to be that Apple would tell you which push tokens (recipients) were rejected (app uninstalled, push disabled for your app, or you stored a bad token to begin with) and you were supposed to stop sending to them, with the implication that Apple would get upset with you if you kept sending to rejecting tokens for too long.
  • tadfisher 3y ago
    This depends on how the app implements notifications, and which mechanism is used to disable them. I know FCM/Android, not APNS/iOS, so here's a breakdown: 1. The app registers a push token with their backend. This can happen without granting notification permissions, and without notifying the user. So the backend is free to start sending push messages immediately after registration, which is typically done on the first app launch. 2. The controls available in Android's per-app notification settings have nothing to do with push messaging. These allow the user to limit or change how the app displays notifications, regardless of the reason the app is displaying them. Some apps have additional options to disable push messages, but that preference must be communicated to the app's backend to prevent the backend from sending pushes in the first place. Some apps may consider Android's notification settings to determine this preference, but it's extra work to do so. The concepts of "push messaging" and "notifications" are often used interchangeably, but at least on Android these are separate systems that are tied together with client code. The push messages may also contain notification data, and the official FCM client will display these automatically, so this confusion is understandable.
• matthewdgreen 3y ago
  Some issues could be prevented if push messages added end-to-end encryption by default, something that shouldn’t be particularly hard to use if it was built into the dev tooling. Instead, developer recommendations like this one [0] suggest that you should put content into your push messages and optionally use a separate library to encrypt them. Clearly developers aren’t doing this, hence the opportunity for surveillance. [0] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/09/notifying-your-users-with-fcm.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/09/notifying-...
  • bryancoxwell 3y ago
    If it’s metadata they’re after (according to the article) would it really matter if the push notifications themselves were encrypted? As long as you’re using Apple/Google’s servers to manage push notifications it seems like there would be some metadata that could be useful for surveillance purposes, encrypted or not.
    • matthewdgreen 3y ago
      Getting rid of all metadata is fundamentally hard, unless providers are willing to deploy PIR or anonymity networks. But I think it's a mistake to assume metadata means "just the timing of a message": these push messages may include a lot of detailed content that is being described in this article as metadata, and all of that stuff can and should be encrypted. Additionally, with a little bit of work (well, really quite a lot) the push messages can be made to hide the source. This would make it harder to distinguish a Gmail or DoorDash notification from a WhatsApp notification.
  • fidotron 3y ago
    Encryption wouldn’t help as the whole point would be to look for coincident timings. I.e. after activity from one user to a known service you see a push occur going to another user. If this pattern repeats you can build confidence they are in contact.
    • nprateem 3y ago
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  > 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." If Apple knew about this why wouldn't they limit their exposure to this user data?
• catchnear4321 3y ago
  > …a source familiar with the matter confirmed that 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.
• px43 3y ago
  Hey other states, can you elect a few more Ron Wydens? He's been doing a ton of the heavy lifting lately. Every time we hear about the intelligence community egregiously violating civil liberties, it's always Wyden.
  • Eumenes 3y ago
    Yeah he's awesome. /s In May 2017, Wyden co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Senate Bill 720, which made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment,[88] for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government. The bill would make it legal for U.S. states to refuse to do business with contractors that engage in boycotts against Israel.[89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden#Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyden#Israel
    • terabytest 3y ago
      I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. How is that acceptable and democratic?
      • Eumenes 3y ago
        I am being sarcastic ;) the guy is supposed to be a freedom fighter for privacy/security but is trying to ban boycotts, the most basic form of protest, and integral to US democracy.
        • rudasn 3y ago
          Well, apparently, that's how a good politician works. Just like a good software engineer would have not one, but two backups, at different locations. It's similar to what economists say about not pulling all your eggs in the same basket.
          • Nthringas 3y ago
• pmlnr 3y ago
  Unifiedpush to save the day! And an XMPP server with Conversations can be the basis for it: Https://unifiedpush.org/users/distributors/conversations/
  • GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    AIU deanonymization happens due to pseudonymity. There are 3 pseudonyms: chat id, push id, phone number. Since all three are constant and linked, they can deanonymize the user. You need some sort of anonymous or confidential protocol to work around it.
  • forward1 3y ago
    Stop promoting and trusting Conversations. Is it bad software which never did OTR verification properly before yanking it unexpectedly and without explanation. To my knowledge it has never been independently audited let alone taken seriously enough by any infosec professionals to warrant such study.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    You do _not_ need push notifications in the first place. Most definitely not for messaging programs anyway. The "saves battery" arguments are always very fluffy and devices/clients who don't do push notifications (or at least don't force you to) sometimes even have better battery life than devices/clients which do.
• XiS 3y ago
  Yet another reason to be a happy GAPPSless LineageOS user
  • ravenstine 3y ago
    What's GAPless? I've been thinking about trying out LineageOS on a refurbished phone, so I'd love to know what I can do to make it even better.
    • henpa 3y ago
      I think it means without "Google Apps" installed (gmail, play, maps, etc, etc).
  • forward1 3y ago
    You're kidding yourself if you think three letter agencies don't have LOS users on a list and have capabilities to spy on them on demand with tailored access.
    • g-b-r 3y ago
      Maybe, but for sure avoiding stock Android and Google apps increases privacy a lot.
      • forward1 3y ago
        Depends on your definition of privacy. Maybe privacy from Google, at the cost of additional scrutiny from domestic intelligence services.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • g-b-r 3y ago
          There are few cases where that would be worse than using a normal all-monitoring android
• Zak 3y ago
  It's a huge problem for both privacy and the open source ecosystem that Apple and Google mandate use of their own notification system for apps to be included in their stores.
  • ta988 3y ago
    And now we understand why they do that.
    • kyrra 3y ago
      It is driven entirely by battery life. Android used to allow 3rd party apps to receive push notifications, and it caused battery life to be terrible compared to Apple. Forcing a single path was done for that reason. Btw, here's the telegram team complaining about the change: https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/blob/master/Notifications.md https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/blob/mas... Facebook abused this a bunch. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/01/uninstalling-facebook-app-saves-up-to-20-of-android-battery-life https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/01/uninstall...
      • g-b-r 3y ago
        Allowing other notification systems would hardly have an impact (especially when someone could replace GCM entirely with them) And you can simply offer more battery controls, rather than general not overridable rules
      • AshamedCaptain 3y ago
        This complain is nonsense. Android _still_ allows background applications, the only limitation they added in that release is that such background applications have to show a notification that they are running (actually a feature if you ask me). You are still allowed to listen on a gazillion sockets perfectly fine. It's more problematic that some Android "skins" tend to kill background applications at random https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/, but at least, one cannot squarely blame Google for that one... The "battery life" argument that that they constantly use is also a very poor excuse. Even when Conversations (the Jabber client) didn't use push notifications at all and would just listen on noisy XMPP sockets, it still had about the lowesst power consumption of all Android messaging programs, lower than Google's own push notifications client app (play services). Certainly I might imagine that if all 1,000 adware apps your average Android user installs all needed to be wired and listening to a socket in order to receive the latest offers (all in the legitimate interest of the user, of course) you might literally run out of memory. But even then there are many solutions (such as inetd like services) that do not require centralizing everything into Google.
• hunglee2 3y ago
  "The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests but described them as democracies allied to the United States" - why not identify them?
  • vermilingua 3y ago
    Because the requests likely contain legal cladding to forbid disclosing the request, as is the case in Australia. A lot of people would be vindicated if it turned out one of the “democracies” making these requests was Australia.
    • peterkelly 3y ago
      Australia was my first guess when I read that sentence. But I expect it's not the only one.
      • thallium205 3y ago
        It’s likely the five eyes allied nations.
        • ericmay 3y ago
          Yep. Most likely to try and catch Chinese spies or other countries like India, Iran, Russia, and others as they continue to go after dissidents abroad.
          • toyg 3y ago
            Or to track US activists and resell the information to the US government, in exchange for data on other five-eyes citizens or access to other surveillance systems (US ones are obviously the best, from a military standpoint).
            • ericmay 3y ago
              Or (insert country you have a political agenda against) to (do thing you disagree with) for the purposes of (pushing your own political agenda).
• nvahalik 3y ago
  Are the contents of push notifications not encrypted? Or are we talking about payloads rather than transport?
  • angio 3y ago
    They mention metadata in the article. Imagine sending a message to a Signal account at time X, then asking Apple a list of all users that received a Signal notification at that specific time.
    • anthonyskipper 3y ago
      This ^. approach and modified forms of it can bu used to track lots of things, and have be done so for decades by some goverment agencies. You can use a method like this even if people are using encryption and lot of anonymous tunnels. You simply shape the traffic and watch where the shape of that traffic stops. Can track people realtime across almost any link, including things like Tor, etc.
      • withinboredom 3y ago
        I had to anonymize some data while still keeping some details. You could imagine individual trees that needed to be put into groups of similar trees so individual details were lost. Anyway, these "trees" were effectively user behavior across all our products. I was shocked that simply knowing *when* (to within a second or two) a person did two or more things, you could narrow it down to *one single person* out of hundreds of millions.
    • tantalor 3y ago
      That doesn't make sense. I would expect Signal notifications to happen completely out-of-band with "normal" push notifications (e.g. NYT news alert). Otherwise that completely defeats the purpose of the service. Basically you're saying Apple/Google are MITM'ing Signal.
      • seanw265 3y ago
• omginternets 3y ago
  I noted that Apple says the governments in question are allies of the United States. I wonder if this is a case of American intelligence outsourcing the surveillance of American citizens to foreign intelligence. If that is indeed the case, I’d expect a quid pro quo.
  • delfinom 3y ago
    Five Eyes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
  • mdhen 3y ago
    Yep sounds like five eyes.
  • iamshs 3y ago
    "democracies allied to the United States." - includes India too.
    • smoldesu 3y ago
      Maybe so, but it seems clear that the surveillance goes both ways: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-09-23/us-diplomat-says-intelligence-from-five-eyes-nations-helped-canada-to-link-india-to-sikhs-killing https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-09-23/us-dip...
      • iamshs 3y ago
        Except that India is not spying on US Government but its own Apple/Google users.
  • andsoitis 3y ago
    > I wonder if this is a case of American intelligence outsourcing the surveillance of American citizens to foreign intelligence. If that is indeed the case, I’d expect a quid pro quo. Yet it is the US government who revealed it: "In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones." - https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments-spying-apple-google-users-through-push-notifications-us-senator-2023-12-06/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
• notaustinpowers 3y ago
  What sort of metadata or information can be gathered from a push notification from an app like iMessage? I know a timestamp is there and most likely the sender's phone number. But is there some sort of sensitive info that these governments are trying to glean? Or is it more so they can build info maps and communication maps on targets?
  • nprateem 3y ago
    Chat message content?
    • notaustinpowers 3y ago
      I know iMessage is E2E encrypted, and I wonder if that extends to the content shown within a push notification. Maybe the push notification servers receive the content encrypted, pushes it to the device, and then decrypted on-device?
      • AshamedCaptain 3y ago
        Why on earth would you _still_ believe that iMessage is E2E encrypted? Even if it was _today_, _nothing_ prevents Apple from silently pushing an update that simply does not encrypt _your_ messages. And even if you trusted Apple on their word, they could still be sent a security letter (like here) from _some_ government forcing them to do it, and forcing them to be silent about it.
        • g-b-r 3y ago
          Not to mention that all apps on iPhones are compulsorily encrypted, so there's no chance to know what any of them is really doing
        • forward1 3y ago
          Simply put, sunk cost fallacy. Apple marketing has completely inundated and exhausted consumers by front-running a BS privacy narrative, to an extent such that users of their products lack even the vocabulary to meaningfully reason about and discuss what privacy is and is not; instead opining an opaque, closed source platform could defend their individual interests from asymmetrically powerful forces at all.
• paulirotta 3y ago
  Metadata in this case apparently means Apple and Google are helping find “this real user connected to that real user at this time”. So governments may or may not be able to decrypt a push message payload, or data delivered because of that payload.
  • tadfisher 3y ago
    FCM messages are not encrypted end-to-end, that's up to the app backend/client to do themselves.
  • omginternets 3y ago
    An interesting point in Glenn Greenwald’s book is that metadata is often more informative than the “real” data. Consider: 1. A phone call in which Mrs. Smith talks to a receptionist to set an appointment with a doctor for 9:30 next Wednesday. Vs. 2. Knowing that Mrs. Smith called an abortion clinic. #2 seems like a bigger violation of privacy. Metadata is the real data.
    • cultureswitch 3y ago
      Exactly. Metadata is how you go from pwning the phone of one dissenter to learning about their whole group.
    • r3d0c 3y ago
      how will actual data not be more informative? you can easily infer what the appointment was because the phone call will mention the name of the doctor or office and you can look that up plus all the details they discuss you'd still have to look up who the doctor they called is from the metadata; it's still info but absolutely not more informative than the real data so this line of thought makes no sense, and glenn greenwald should be looked at very skeptically in general, he sounds smart but when you look at his logic closer it breaks down
      • omginternets 3y ago
        >you can easily infer what the appointment was because the phone call will mention the name of the doctor or office and you can look that up plus all the details they discuss You're assuming these things are mentioned. "Hi, I'd like to book/confirm an appointment with Dr. Jones." doesn't leak information about "abortion". Yes, these things obviously depend on what information is transmitted. The point, however, is that metadata more reliably transmits sensitive information than does "the data".
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• world2vec 3y ago
  Pardon my ignorance but would block all push notifications stop this specific act of surveillance? I usually don't need any notifications' content on the screen apart from "you have a new message on <app>, go check it". Or is that what's being discussed here?
  • ksynwa 3y ago
    The article says that Google and Apple know about the push notifications being shown on the phone and governments can make these companies turn over customer data. I'm not sure if it only covers (for example) the unified notification service on Android or whether Apple and Google know of notifications that don't make use of that API. It's not clear from the article.
    • g-b-r 3y ago
      I don't know about Apple but on Android it's almost a capital sin to strive to use other services, and they work a lot worse than GCM (because of all the artificial limitations that Google imposed over the years).
  • unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
    It does seem to be notifications on the phone, but (a) that's incredibly surprising and disturbing and (b) it's really unclear why or how that would work when a phone is disconnected from the network. In any event, Google inserting themselves into notifications would be tantamount to reading all my email, texts and everything else, so ... why wouldn't this be restricted to opt-in? Many questions.
  • alexjm 3y ago
    A push notification is generally what creates the "you have a new message on <app>" red bubble.
• MR4D 3y ago
  Ron Ryden has been barking up this tree for a long time: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/issues/secret-law https://www.wyden.senate.gov/issues/secret-law https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-colleagues-introduce-legislation-to-ban-data-brokers-from-selling-americans-location-and-health-data https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-colle... https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-introduces-comprehensive-bill-to-secure-americans-personal-information-and-hold-corporations-accountable https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-intro... https://www.wyden.senate.gov/priorities/gps-act https://www.wyden.senate.gov/priorities/gps-act https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-releases-discussion-draft-of-legislation-to-provide-real-protections-for-americans-privacy https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-relea...
  • InSteady 3y ago
    Nine times out of ten, when there's a news piece about a senator advocating for privacy and constitutional rights with regards to tech, it's senator Wyden. He's on the senate intelligence committee and has a decent track record of getting shit done with bipartisan support, so he's not just virtue signaling for votes either (not to mention that he's basically unbeatable in state election with all the support he has in Oregon). He's 74 years old, I do hope someone will step up and carry the torch when he retires. It's a losing battle but it's still important that we have someone who is competent and well respected to fight it for us.
    • matthewfcarlson 3y ago
      I know it's the Oregonian in me and getting to meet him as a kid where he spent a decent amount of time with my class, but he strikes me as a senator that Oregon can be proud of. I might not agree with him on everything, but in my personal opinion, he's advocating and pushing for change on what he personally believes in. Makes me wish my current senator was more like that.
      • digging 3y ago
        > he's advocating and pushing for change on what he personally believes in That's certainly a step above many of the grifters we have in government, but it's also not necessarily a good thing. People can truly believe in stuff that's harmful or flat out wrong.
• HumblyTossed 3y ago
  It should only[0] be meta data, though. The push notification should signal the app that there is data to fetch, then the app goes and fetches it. The push notification itself should carry none of the data. [0] still bad though and they should stop.
  • MaxikCZ 3y ago
    I so hate when people put words "only" and "metadata" in the same sentence... They know you rang a phone sex line at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don't know what you talked about. They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret. They know you got an email from an HIV testing service, then called your doctor, then visited an HIV support group website in the same hour. But they don't know what was in the email or what you talked about on the phone. They know you received an email from a digital rights activist group with the subject line “Let’s Tell Congress: Stop SESTA/FOSTA” and then called your elected representative immediately after. But the content of those communications remains safe from government intrusion. They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local abortion clinic’s number later that day.
    • HumblyTossed 3y ago
      Dude, did you read my point? I said it was still bad.
      • fsflover 3y ago
        "Still bad" strongly underestimates the problem. Metadata often is more important than the data as demonstrated in the above examples.
        • HumblyTossed 3y ago
          But my intention was to point out that actual content wasn't being transmitted and that "only" meta data was gleaned since some people seem to think that chat messages are being scooped up. Other people have rightly pointed out that meta data is bad and why and I didn't feel the need to reiterate that.
• fsflover 3y ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543587 Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users (macrumors.com)
• jeffbee 3y ago
  Is anyone surprised? Why would there be pen registers, and tap and trace for phone calls and email, but not for other traffic? The ability of governments to do secret surveillance of such metadata is well established in law and jurisprudence, variously in various countries. It is a Weird Nerd Thing to believe that old laws can't apply to new computer thing.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• chatmasta 3y ago
  This, to me, is the more disturbing part of the article: > 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. What is the point of transparency reports if they don't include major vectors of government surveillance? IMO such gag orders shouldn't be legal when applied to dragnet surveillance. If you want to gag a company from notifying an individual they're being surveilled (with a warrant), then fine. But gagging a company from disclosing untargeted or semi-targeted surveillance, especially if it involves American citizens, seems like it should be unconstitutional on free speech grounds.
  • cultureswitch 3y ago
    Seems like a pretty open and shut case of unconstitutional restriction of speech in the US. Especially when you consider the wording of the Apple communication saying that they can talk about it openly now that it's public knowledge.
    • indymike 3y ago
      > Seems like a pretty open and shut case of unconstitutional restriction of speech I wish it didn't cost a lot of money and years of your life to beat these over-reaches.
    • iAMkenough 3y ago
      Given the US has a 4th Amendment-free zone within 100 miles of all national borders in the name of national security, I expect the same justification and level of oversight here. https://www.aclu.org/documents/constitution-100-mile-border-zone https://www.aclu.org/documents/constitution-100-mile-border-...
      • forward1 3y ago
        This is a common misconception. The 100 mile radius does not waive 4th Amendment protection. A reasonable suspicion of immigration law violation is still required to detain, search and ultimately arrest individuals. To wit: please name a single instance of someone having their rights abused by this so-called "zone".
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• eggy 3y ago
  Given a lot of journalists and activists use encrypted communications to be able to do their job without being unduly or unjustly persecuted (yes, the bad guys use them too!), and 12 US State Attorney Generals just signed a letter and delivered it to the major news agencies (NYT, CNN, Reuters, AP, etc.) that warns of any "support to terrorist organizations" and specifically points out Hamas, but is not very clear on what "support" or "business relationship" means (sending a camera to do a report where the press is not allowed due to Israel's complete control of the media - echoes of US journalist access during the Iraq War), and puts them on notice. Nothing is safe from Big Brother, anywhere, any country.
  • wahnfrieden 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • andrei_says_ 3y ago
      At this point any “both sides are the same” argument should be seen as either incredibly misguided or intentionally malicious. Look for representatives who represent more or at least some of our actual interests. An ideologically united group which has been working to actively disrupt the election process and turn women into breeding property, combined with unlimited surveillance? Might not be the “same”.
  • codys 3y ago
    To add a bit more context here, the "12 US State Attorney Generals" here are 14 Republican US State Attorneys general. their letter: https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/IACIO/2023/12/04/file_attachments/2704666/Final%20-%20States%20Material%20Support%20Letter.pdf https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/IACIO/2023/12/04...
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• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  This is yet another example of: If the data can be collected it will be used by governments You can slow this down by making data explicitly built to be impossible to read in transit (eg e2e) and then deleting or never saving it, but the fact that data flows through multiple stops means each transition is an opportunity for third party observation This is deterministic and is built into the structure of data production transport and consumption. This is part of the infrastructure and cannot be extricated
  • forward1 3y ago
    E2E does not solve the problem outlined here: surveillance of metadata at a global panopticon scale.
  • dhx 3y ago
    See [1] for an overview of "state of the art" metadata-protecting communications protocols. There has been much research into this problem over decades and the effectiveness of such protocols very much depends on real world use cases and practicalities. For example, protocols may require 100 seconds to send a message to ensure adequate mixing, and then may be limited to always-transmitting-24/7 endpoints consuming much power, and then also requiring participants in the network to trust each other not to mount a denial of service attack. [1] SoK: Metadata-Protecting Communication Systems, Sajin Sasy and Ian Goldberg, Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/313, https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/313.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/313.pdf
• stuff4ben 3y ago
  Just an evil life pro-tip... if you're doing criminal things, leave your phone at home. Or better yet, grab a "buddy's" phone.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    Here is a better pro-tip- don't do criminal things.
    • stuff4ben 3y ago
      where's the fun in that??? Live a little, be a little bit evil. Like 5% evil
      • I_Am_Nous 3y ago
        Statistically if everyone is 5% evil, the chances of someone being evil to you in the course of the day is pretty high. That sounds like the makings for a downward spiral and "don't be evil at all" is much safer for society. Obviously there will be people who choose to be mostly evil regardless of what everyone else is doing, but society trying not to be evil in general is still the best case scenario.
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
        I take a penny but I never leave one.
    • unethical_ban 3y ago
      I bet you've committed at least a ticketable offense in the past 48 hours, unless you are a true hermit. Our laws were not designed for a society with perfect surveillance.
      • lostNFound 3y ago
        This is quite the proposition. You think that the average person commits a legal offense at least every 2 days? What examples are you proposing? If you count speeding, sure I guess.
• toasted-subs 3y ago
  I feel extremely uncomfortable using any of my devices.
  • InCityDreams 3y ago
    Only now?
• forward1 3y ago
  Closed source proprietary for-profit platforms previously implicated in global surviellance scandals continue spying on users. News at 11.
• xyst 3y ago
  Would be great to see an example of notification metadata that can supposedly link it to real users. Seems like this is what is being implied: Given: - users with notifications enabled - have X app installed - targeted user(s) reside in USA - targeted users(s) following “foo” on X app When: - issue FISA warrant for all smartphone users that received notifications in regards to “foo” user Then: - able to pull all Apple/Google accounts that match this criteria - able to get real addresses and names - can crosscheck names with other details to narrow down suspect Or maybe it’s something even worse where notifications somehow leak location data
  • onionisafruit 3y ago
    If they use IP to deliver notifications, then the gov can demand they hand over the IP address a notification was delivered to. From there, location isn’t hard.
    • xyst 3y ago
      IP geolocation isn’t exactly the most precise though. 600M+ IPs have a default location to some farm in Kansas [1] [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/08/10/lawsuit-how-a-quiet-kansas-home-wound-up-with-600-million-ip-addresses-and-a-world-of-trouble/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/08/1...
      • onionisafruit 3y ago
        I should have been more specific. Although they could use IP geolocation, they can also get data from the cell carrier that delivered the notification to that IP address. So a gov finds that IP address 7.8.9.0 received one of these notifications at 12:34. They then see that 7.8.9.0 is one of ATT’s addresses. They go to ATT and learn that address was used by their customer onionisafruit at 12:34 and the device was 5ms away from tower A.
        • jaywalk 3y ago
          Notifications aren't sent to IP addresses, so none of this matters.
• FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  A paranoid part of me has wondered if some of the text/phone spam we all receive is actually used to stimulate cellphones for tracking purposes. If you have deeper access to the OS, then fingerprint unlock or FaceID also seem important for positive identification prior to, for example, a Predator strike.
  • forward1 3y ago
    "We Kill People Based on Metadata" - Michael Hayden
  • knallfrosch 3y ago
    I don't think so. I'm German and receive the spam, even though I can be tracked using SMS messages that aren't shown on the display at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Silent_SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Silent_SMS Plus, you can always ask the carriers to which tower(s) a phone is connected and simply triangulate from there, without sending any (user) data to the phone.
    • Kon-Peki 3y ago
      It's important to know that the entire worldwide mobile phone network needs to have a reasonable estimation of the location of each device in order to work. "Phone call for XYZ", "SMS for XYZ", "Establish TCP connection to XYZ". Every single device that hears this has to decode the message to the point that it can say "Nope, this isn't for me. Ignore". You've got billions of devices online at once, doing things that require messages to be sent to them. The network has to find a way to broadcast these messages to the tiniest geographic area that it possibly can, or else the whole thing breaks down. So yes, there are plenty of completely normal, standard ways that the network can make your phone say "I'm over here" without anything showing up on your screen. (I worked at Motorola in infrastructure tech for many years)
• forward1 3y ago
  Why do they need to confirm an already known fact: FAANG platforms are built to spy on users? We've known about this fact for at least a decade since the Snowden revelations. Nothing has materially changed since then, technically, politically, legally, or even culturally. Yet people still believe for-profit corporations have their best interests in mind, thanks to clever marketing and groupthink, clutching to "encrypted apps" and empty "we value your privacy" double-speak: neither will defend you. There is no privacy on proprietary closed source platforms - it is simply infeasible; it is trying to squeeze blood from a stone. I know this truth will likely trigger and upset people with their $1,000+ iPhones, MacBooks and other iToys, and this sunk cost fallacy is really pathetic to witness in grown adults.
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• gowld 3y ago
  It's fascinating that about half hese comments appear to be from younger people unfamiliar with "USA PATRIOT" Act gag orders, FISA, Five Eyes, Least Untruthful Response and related controversies that were big in the news 10-20 years ago. Amusingly and sadly, the law was called PATRIOT as a normal "give a bad law a Good name", but over time "patriot" has become synonym for "traitor" in common use.
  • instagib 3y ago
    There’s probably some you’ve missed but yeah, I like the “they can’t do this because of * “ comments. Reminds me of the Eufy issue where they said everything was encrypted except for push notification images. Hard to pick the most appropriate Orwellian quote. "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." ~ George Orwell
  • hindsightbias 3y ago
    Why would it be unusual for a generation that’s been under surveillance since they were in the incubator to not hold quaint and obsolete views of privacy? If we held a poll, what percentage of privacy-loving HN parents don’t have tracking on their kids phone? 5%? 10%?
• marban 3y ago
  Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543587
• alfiedotwtf 3y ago
  Another case of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine in motion
• hexage1814 3y ago
  Water is wet.
• Podgajski 3y ago
  Now we know why Apple and Google are a duopoly…. You get the illusion of choice but you get the same government spying on you in either case.
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  • forward1 3y ago
    It is ultimately ignorant to think one is not spied upon in daily comings and goings, when the entire human economy is based on data and the study of it (especially at scale), whether by government, private enterprise or sole evil individual. With Apple/Google you get the comfortable padded jail cell with 24/7 guards to protect - and monitor you; the digital equivalent of having a police officer live with you. You can't go outside of the walled garden and you're told this is for good reason. Without them, you're totally on your own; you better be prepared and know how to defend yourself. No one will care about your security and privacy. But don't for a second think you're not still under the all-seeing eye of panopticon surveillance, and possibly additional scrutiny therein.
• Trias11 3y ago
  >> Reuters' source would not identify which governments were making the data requests but described them as "democracies allied to the United States." It feels so liberating to be spied upon by "democracies allied to the United States." vs. others. LOL.
  • InCityDreams 3y ago
    Now you know how the rest of us [abroad in the world] feel regarding the US.
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• heywoodlh 3y ago
  One question I have as someone who tries to maintain (some) data sovereignty: is there any way as an end-user to circumvent/mitigate this kind of surveillance — aside from abandoning iOS and Android completely?
  • sneak 3y ago
    On iOS, all notifications must go via the centralized APNS, but on non-Google Android (eg Graphene) it is possible to run the device with the Google FCM stuff blocked off. Some apps will break, but stuff that runs in the background for polling or does non-Google notifications will continue to work.
    • CharlesW 3y ago
      The Reuters article says that the government is getting this data from Apple and Google, which means it doesn't matter if your phone displays or even receives the notifications, no?
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  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    Google-free Android will allow you (force you) to use alternative push servers. That could be your own server (using something like Unified Push) or querying your apps' servers directly. This comes at the cost of battery life, sometimes significantly so, but it does decentralise the notification system. Of course, your data will still be in the hands of app vendors unless you choose your apps wisely. You should also block analytics on the network level (using firewall apps or alternative means) because these days developers like to send analytics events for every button pressed, all associated with your phone's unique identifier. If the government can use push notifications for tracking, imagine the tracking they can do through Firebase Analytics or one of its many data hoarding alternatives.
    • forward1 3y ago
      Parent is asking about government surveillance. You're suggesting a deviation from the norm (99.99% of users) by installing a custom operating system (which they will now also be on the hook to secure and update regularly) by developers with nothing to lose. This will greatly increase scrutiny on you, or colloquially speaking definitely put you on a watch list, the opposite of what is allegedly desired. Rather, accept the plain fact electronic communications are subject to government surveillance and adjust your threat model accordingly. Don't try to fight the bear with a flyswatter.
• AlexandrB 3y ago
  Must be interesting to work on the teams responsible for compliance at Apple/Google. Would talking to someone about these kinds of orders qualify as treason under US law?
• deafpolygon 3y ago
  Completely unrelated, but sort of related. With all this surveillance and spying going on, what's a normal citizen to do? For example; Cloud storage? Streaming music? Online note-taking? Should the more technically-inclined, but average, person start looking at taking more and more of these things off-line given the state of mass surveillance going on and the crazy push towards all things AI?
• asow92 3y ago
  Apps like https://www.joustip.com/ https://www.joustip.com/ offer e2e encrypted push notifications.
  • buryat 3y ago
    how do they guarantee that everything is protected and they don’t share data with someone?
    • asow92 3y ago
      How would you want that qualified exactly?
      • buryat 3y ago
        > Does Joust sell my data? > No, Joust does not sell any user data. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
      • digging 3y ago
        This is a question you would ask if you/they had already provided some evidence for the claim and it was deemed insufficient. Making a bold claim should come with some ability to justify it ready-to-go.
• loughnane 3y ago
  I know Pinephone isn't ready for daily use from all the threads here, but I just ordered one to get some stick time with it. Getting real tired of having to fight my phone to keep my data mine. I just want the equivalent of debian, but on mobile. I understand I'll have to give up a bunch of apps, but honestly I think its worth it. As soon as its possible I'd like off this ride.
  • fsflover 3y ago
    Alternatively, consider Librem 5, which is more stable, since its software is developed by a dedicated team.
    • Klonoar 3y ago
      Librem needs to do something PR-wise to fix the reputation they developed regarding massive product/delivery delays. They exist in the frustrating spot of “I want to like them, but I can’t trust the purchase based off of everyone I know who tried getting burned, so now I’ll just look at a Pinephone because it’s easier”.
      • fsflover 3y ago
        I don't understand how delays of preorders are relevant today, when the devices are available within 10 working days.
        • Klonoar 3y ago
          Call me when a glance at the Purism subreddit isn't people still complaining about problems here. ;P
          • fsflover 3y ago
            People in charge of that subreddit are Purism haters. They ban supporters and encourage complaining, even if baseless.
    • 3y ago
• loughnane 3y ago
  It'd be cool if Signal and other privacy-focused apps added an option to delay push notifications. That would obfuscate the connection between two accounts. Its a band-aid, but its something.
  • QuarterReptile 3y ago
    once upon a time, I had an app that limited network connection for the whole phone to 30 minute refreshes. It was a pretty cool trick.
• TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  It's crazy to me that so much effort is being expended pretending that companies and the government are doing anything in the name of privacy, when we have all the proof by Assange and Snowden that they're doing realtime surveillance of ALL communications, 24x7 -- no matter what any laws say -- and we don't even talk about it any more. What's the point of any of this? All we can do is assume that our every position, purchase, and electronic communication is being tracked and saved, and act accordingly. The Constitution no longer matters, and there's no one coming to save us.
  • Nifty3929 3y ago
    I think where we go wrong is to allow the conversation to revolve around what evil corporations are doing with our information, rather than what the evil government is doing with it. I believe the risk to our freedom is much greater from the latter. Of course governments can extract the information from corporations that have it, but let's keep the spotlight on the government itself, and use THAT as a reason to give corps less information about us. Corporations showing me better-targeted ads is the least of my troubles.
    • tbrockman 3y ago
      “Better-targeted advertisements” is not the most nefarious way this information is used. That’s just one of the selling points to entice advertisers. It’s also been used extensively to determine content that you will find the most engaging, regardless of whether it’s to your benefit or not, so that ad-driven marketplaces may harvest and sell your attention. If you have any contemporary examples of the way the government has used the same information, in a way that’s been more widely destructive, I would be curious to know more.
    • wharvle 3y ago
      > Of course governments can extract the information from corporations that have it, but let's keep the spotlight on the government itself, and use THAT as a reason to give corps less information about us. Yep. Treating the two as distinct makes no sense. Corporate dragnet surveillance collecting forever-datasets isn't meaningfully different from the government doing the same thing, directly. People who fear government power ought to support outlawing corporate collection of the same types of things they don't want government collecting. Granted that's relying on the government to prevent corporations from doing things in order to limit... the government (and, incidentally and IMO beneficially, also the corporations themselves). However, that's the only effective mechanism we've got—and the basis of all the other mechanisms we have available, ultimately, short of violence and strikes and such—and I think it's implausible that, even assuming a great deal of bad-faith behavior, such a move wouldn't significantly curb this activity.
• robbiet480 3y ago
  We at the Home Assistant Companion for iOS team have been wanting to implement end to end encryption for our push notifications for a while now but Apple has denied our request for the com.apple.developer.usernotifications.filtering [0] entitlement multiple times. Wondering if with today's news we could apply again and get it. For context, we are sending ~35 million push notifications per month on iOS and ~67 million on Android, see more at [1] [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/entitlements/com_apple_developer_usernotifications_filtering https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en... [1]: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1721717002946191480.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1721717002946191480.html
  • michh 3y ago
    for my understanding, you need that entitlement so you can send an encrypted invisible notification which you can then decrypt locally in your app and push out again as a local notification that doesn't go over the network (i.e. not use apns)? Or is doing this kind of stuff just weirdly tied to that specific entitlement?
    • robbiet480 3y ago
      Correct, we need to be able to filter to properly unencrypt notifications and pass them on as a local notification.
    • baybal2 3y ago
      [dead]
    • xenadu02 3y ago
      No, you do not need this just for decryption. This entitlement is only required if you want your Notification Extension to be able to silently eat the notification. Normally an extension must transform the notification then the system presents it to the user. APNS is not a "let my server wake up my app in the background whenever and however often I like" mechanism. Defer handling other things until either your extension or your app would have run anyway and do them at that time.
• willmadden 3y ago
  In the past, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and a slew of other companies would have been broken up using anti-trust laws. These aren't just monopolies at this point, they are clusters of monopolies. This is leading us down a dark path.
• jodrellblank 3y ago
  > ""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."" When they were building the CSAM detector: "what if the government asks you to extend the detection to include other media such as political meme images?" "we would refuse".
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    Being prohibited from disclosure does not in any way refute their promise to refuse. It would make it hard to prove one way or the other, but that is not the same problem.
    • nickthegreek 3y ago
      But if they fail in their refusal, we would not know. So you have to treat it as if they have already failed and plan accordingly.
      • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        This is really the conclusion of the debate over whether privacy protections should be legal or technological. The answer is both, which in particular means that they have to be technological. We need to prove their inability to defect with math because otherwise they can just lie about it. What you need from the law is the right for everybody to use that kind of technology by default.
        • weikju 3y ago
          Comment of the year (decade?), cannot upvote enough.
  • 1oooqooq 3y ago
    wow. Yahoo have a better track record than google or apple on figthing against that https://money.cnn.com/2014/09/11/technology/security/yahoo-fisa-court/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2014/09/11/technology/security/yahoo-f... I guess now the yahoo phone doesn't sound like that bad of a joke https://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/nokia_yahoo_onion-600x420.jpg https://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/nokia_y...
• Ruthalas 3y ago
  UnifiedPush[0] seems like a great alternative to notifications passing through Apple/Google's hands, and I wish it was implemented in more apps. [0] https://unifiedpush.org/ https://unifiedpush.org/
• alberth 3y ago
  I'm probably naive, but what insights could a government gleam from Push Notifications? And why aren't push notifications E2EE?
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    > I'm probably naive, but what insights could a government gleam from Push Notifications? Looking at my own phone right now, it just got a push notification that my wife has arrived at home. That could be useful if you wanted to track my wife. > And why aren't push notifications E2EE? That's a great question. And I hope the answer is "we're on it, they will be E2EE in the next release."
    • alberth 3y ago
      Does the push notification indicate where (location) home is?
      • rootusrootus 3y ago
        In this case, no. But as a data point it is useful at providing a named location and a timestamp. Presumably any governmental agency with access to the push notification stream can already determine my wife's home address. We could lie in the app and call some other place "Home" but I expect very few people are resorting to codewords in their mundane daily life.
    • zer0x4d 3y ago
      If the notifications were to be truly E2EE, it would have to work something like this: 1. Generate a local key pair per app (never uploaded to Apple). 2. Each app can request their public key from iOS (or provided with (void) application:(UIApplication )application didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken:(NSData )deviceToken andPublickKey: (NSData *)publicKey;). 3. App uploads token + public key to their own server. 4. Server encrypts notification payload with the public key before sending to APNS. 5. Apple forwards encrypted payload to device. 6. Device uses the bundle name to look up the local private key and uses it to decrypt the payload.
• deleted 3y ago
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• zeppelin101 3y ago
  This reminds me, whatever happened to mesh networks? If you wanted to be out and about in public, you could simply carry a very anonymized device that had only more basic abilities. But among those abilities, you could certain send messages and maybe even smaller-sized files - all over a mesh network. Feds could infiltrate it, but it wouldn't be nearly as trivial as it is right now. And users could rotate their devices. Furthermore, if the device in question wasn't a real phone, but rather something more generic (a wifi-capable device with a keyboard, virtual or physical), then it wouldn't even need to have an IMEI.
  • anigbrowl 3y ago
    They're still a thing, and more of a happening thing than ever because they're useful for IOT. There's a bunch of private LoRa network operators offering a mix of free and paid services. Amazon is already a large player in this space because of their delivery network.
  • jjtheblunt 3y ago
    I wonder if Apple's Airtag devices use mesh networking of some sort.
    • withinboredom 3y ago
      I imagine they designed it the way they did specifically to prevent law enforcement from tapping them.
      • coolspot 3y ago
        Not law enforcement, but random punks. Law enforcement can get your airtag private keys from your iCloud backup.
        • withinboredom 3y ago
          That’s not how an AirTag works. Anyone can request any AirTag by simply knowing the public key (which is broadcast via BLE). Then you just need the private key which doesn’t need to be backed up by disabling keychain backups.
• standardUser 3y ago
  The only way out of this mess is with new laws and that will require new lawmakers. Any other solution - relying on the kindness of corporations, toiling away with obscure technologies, gong 'off the grid' - are all foolish or unrealistic for 99% or so of people and shouldn't even be considered. The most promising starting point is probably at the state level.
  • cronix 3y ago
    I'm not sure new laws will matter much considering they've been breaking the existing laws through creative interpretation.
    • crawfordcomeaux 3y ago
      This legal structure of governance already kills so many people unintentionally, it's unethical to keep trying to reform it when it was designed from flawed principles. Time for a full redesign.
      • standardUser 3y ago
        And if they shoot you dead first, you're cool with that? For the cause?
        • crawfordcomeaux 3y ago
          I mean, I'm already a target for various things/reason. That's why I'm an advocate for viral movements so we hit a point where the movement's so large, we skip over the part of the process where killing us would be an effective means of stopping the movement. But yeah, I'm not going to let threat of death keep me from plowing forward. Embracing death is part of death practice. I'm still going to move forward playfully and through harm reduction.
          • standardUser 3y ago
            Personally, I think we have seen too much change within our system in my lifetime for me to think hundreds of thousands or millions of people should die in the off chance that we can change it to something remarkably better.
• deviantbit 3y ago
  Wyden voted for the Patriot Act. If he is concerned why hasn't he introduced legislation to repeal it? This government is out of control.
• jay-barronville 3y ago
  Legitimately scary stuff but not surprising. Snowden risked everything to tell us what was going on and where things were headed yet here we are. At this point, it seems the only way to not be subject to this type of treatment by our governments is to completely unplug from the system, but of course, practically speaking, this isn’t feasible for the overwhelming majority of our society. So what are the alternatives here?
  • crtified 3y ago
    Are powerful mobile phones packed with Apps and constant notifications so necessary to a full, fun, enjoyable techy life, really? I am legitimately surprised that more tech-heads didn't see this state-of-affairs (and all the other obvious drawbacks of The World's Most Featureful Spy Device, controlled end-to-end by a giant multinational, becoming ubiquitous in peoples back pockets) as an obvious, absolute given, right from the very start of the whole smartphone trend. Instead we all seem to have bought into it, hook-line-and-sinker.
    • SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
      The really scary thing is that, forget what you said, they're starting to become more and more necessary for the bare minimum existence. We're not quite there yet, but it's becoming harder and harder to simply exist without one of these things.
    • timeon 3y ago
      > I am legitimately surprised that more tech-heads didn't see this state-of-affairs Didn't see or didn't bite the hand that feeds?
  • steelframe 3y ago
    > So what are the alternatives here? You have to be willing to live with something less feature-rich than what you can get on the latest iPhone 27 Max Pro(TM). And you have to be gutsy enough to click an "Install some other OS" button in your web browser with your phone plugged into a USB port. Then to extend to services, a lot of it depends on your ability to deploy your own stuff. This can involve a lot of time reading how-to guides after you've installed Linux on a machine in your house. Given how much documentation is readily available online most people with a high school diploma can probably figure it all out, but you have to be motivated enough to refuse to be helpless. Today you can purchase a Pixel 7[|a|Pro] and flash GrapheneOS on it. There's a lot you can get from F-Droid, but if you really want Google Play Store apps, GrapheneOS does a reasonable job sandboxing it. Create a new Google account just for that installation of Google Play Store. Never sign into anything Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, or whatever from your phone. Or at least if you absolutely have to, use a trusted web browser in Incognito or Private Browsing Mode. Keep location tracking disabled for everything but your favorite maps app. Put your phone in Airplane Mode when you're traveling if you don't want cell towers to capture your location info. GPS reception still works. WG Tunnel can get you to your server when you're not on your home network. Some people swear by Tailscale, but you have to trust them with your node info. Syncthing works for backup for a lot of people. For private maps I've been using Organic Maps with some success. Searching for places isn't necessarily trivial, but the navigation feature has always worked well for me. For private comms you really need it to go both ways (you and the recipient). The weak point is likely to be the recipient's environment, but at least something like Signal gives you a chance. Something like Fastmail works for email and calendar, since they're probably not building a profile on you and selling that to advertisers. DAVx5 is free from F-Droid for calendar sync. Kagi works really well for search. Also, they probably haven't sold out to advertisers. DuckDuckGo is another option with another set of trade-offs. For music you can serve FLAC files via minidlnad to VLC. minidlnad was a 3-minute tweak to a config file after I apt-got it. There are tons of options here. Explore F-Droid for stuff that might do better for privacy, like Spotube, FreeOTP, Podverse, Librara FD, Cheogram, etc. I'm not claiming that the F-Droid apps will all give you perfect privacy, but in general they're probably better than a lot of the stuff that's pushed in the Play store. Check out e-books and audiobooks from your local library. Or copy them to your device via Syncthing after feeding your e-books through Calibre's DeDRM extension. The idea is to keep from having to context license servers from your phone. Give up on Apple or Google Pay, credit cards, and loyalty programs if you don't want your eReceipts collected and added to your consumer profile by companies that do that sort of thing. None of this is a surefire way to give yourself perfect privacy, but it can greatly reduce the amount of your personal information that your government and/or corporations collect on you via your mobile device.
• demarq 3y ago
  [flagged]
• wkat4242 3y ago
  Great news considering we're now getting an extreme-right fascist government in Holland. Why not give them all our data on a platter, they can be trusted.
• OneLeggedCat 3y ago
  > "The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests but described them as democracies allied to the United States" Oh look! The US end-running constitutional protections again via 5+Eye proxy governments. Who could ever have guessed.
• motohagiography 3y ago
  Is this a timing side channel attack, where say I am a member of a Signal group, or have a Proton email client or Matrix/Element or something, are they sending patterns of beacon messages that may look normal, and then watching the traffic across mobile networks (or directly on platforms) that matches, and then narrowing endpoints that show it?
• diebeforei485 3y ago
  Push notifications are sent from an app server to an individual device, correct? And the device enrolls with the server for receiving push notifications. Why isn't there key exchange happening at the time of enrollment? Why is it something apps have to manually do? We moved the web to https everywhere for a reason, why are apps behind the web in privacy? Potentially stupid question - how is iMessage encrypted end to end if the notifications aren't?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • contact9879 3y ago
    Apps can still do what they want in the content of the notification. This includes encrypting the content however they'd like. By default, though, apps don't encrypt the content. And the metadata (what appleID is receiving notifications from what app) is still known to Apple.
• gnarlouse 3y ago
  I disabled notifications on my phone long ago. I wonder if they still occur.
• simplypeter 3y ago
  If you think world governments can’t back door into any aspect of your life, you’ve been deluding yourself.
• getcrunk 3y ago
  How does signal address this? I always wondered
• happytiger 3y ago
  It's time for a privacy bill of rights. You have to attach inalienable rights to people and then enforce them at the civil rights level. These things are troubling now. In the post AGI world these are much more difficult problems because the data becomes training for purposes far beyond anything that could be foreseen in the data collection questions.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  With respect to the US, I would be more worried about Apple and Google spying on users through push notifications. Americans have legal protections against government spying but they have basically zero protections against spying by so-called "tech" companies. Neither Apple nor Google can demand information about citizens from the government, but the government can demand this from Apple or Google, which they do, successfully, with increasing frequency. People share details of their lives with Apple and Google they would probably never share with the government but the government has little trouble getting it from these so-called "tech" companies, without any notice to the user, so sharing these details with Apple and Google is arguably even worse. The ability for people to fight against this sharing of information is nonexistent; it's up to the companies to resist. Given the number of users whose data they hold, that simply is not feasible. These companies do not care about peoples' privacy. They seek to profit from learning every detail of peoples' lives. Commercial surveillance. When the government asks citizens for information it's usually for a specific purpose and can only be used for that purpose. When so-called "tech" companies collect information, it is for any purpose. They might assure users that "the information is only used to improve the software or service". What limits does this create, if any. How dow we verify that the company is not using our information in ways that compromise our interests if we are not allowed to learn how the company is using the information. Imagine if the government assured people that the information it collects "will only be used to improve the government". Not every computer is a national security threat or even a common criminal, i.e., a person that the government has some need to spy on. That's not who I am referring to in this comment. These so-called "tech" companies spy on everyone. And they don't just want to know about one thing, for one purpose, they want to know everything for any purpose.
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    Are the legal protections against government spying actually worth anything though? Eg. Parallel construction, FISA, etc etc. But also, you're whispering right in that if Google and Apple are able to do this, then is that "laundered" spying, I'm that various law enforcement and government agencies can buy this information?
  • forward1 3y ago
• gumballindie 3y ago
  If you wish privacy then just get a linux phone. May not have the coolest features but if you need more than a classic phone, linux phones will do fine. Less apps means fewer distractions - a win win situation.
• Zuiii 3y ago
  How does this apply to whatsapp's e2ee promise? Do they use this system? Do google and apple have plain text messages that were supposedly private?
• ipcress_file 3y ago
  I guess you have to assume that any message in transit over a public network is public. Of course, you can use something like PGP to encrypt messages before sending them, provided that the recipient has your key. I know of a few people who do that. Outside of that kind of thing, we're probably yelling everything out loud to anyone who wants to listen.
• brundolf 3y ago
  I'm surprised hyper-private services like Signal haven't foreseen this as a potential vector and given you options to eg. exclude different details from push notifications (or warned you to disable them altogether if you're worried about it)
  • Klonoar 3y ago
    Unless my memory is seriously off, Signal push notifications just tell your device to call and fetch. It’s not like they’re unaware and just sending you stuff in plain text.
    • gimbalpirate 3y ago
      Can you elaborate on this? I'm still not sure if Signal notifications are any less vulnerable than others.
      • Klonoar 3y ago
        The gist of it is that when Signal sends you a push notification, it's just a marker for "hey, you have updates". It doesn't contain unencrypted data that could be passed to another actor - Signal isn't stupid enough to do this. The app will then call out to pull down any updates. Thus, we wind up in the following situation: the US govt could ask Apple for a list of people who got notifications at X/y/z time to try and tie it to someone who sent at those times, but Signal is so large and widely used that it'd be finding a needle in a haystack (and that's probably putting it lightly). The news from this article is concerning, no doubt... but I'm not particularly worried about Signal is all.
  • stephen_g 3y ago
    My Signal notifications on iOS just say 'Message received!', not sure what else is in the payload but nothing else is displayed... It seems unfathomable that they would push any unencrypted message content or information relating to who is messaging you through notifications that travel over third party servers, so I very much doubt there's much of interest in the payload...
  • 3y ago
• freedomben 3y ago
  Why didn't Apple pull the plug on these services as soon as the government started spying with them? Why didn't they rearchitect them to use E2E encrypt? Do they actually have principles about privacy or is it just a thing they want us to believe?
  • roody15 3y ago
    Apple uses “privacy” as a marketing term. They market themselves as protecting your “privacy” from advertisers unlike Google. Apple open complies with all data requests from government agencies and law enforcement. It is not a hard process for law enforcement to get someone’s iCloud data with a warrant. https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-requests/ https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...
• greyadept 3y ago
  Does this mean governments can intercept and possibly interact with the “This was me” 2FA notifications that a few apps are using now?
• intrasight 3y ago
  I must be fundamentally missing something here. I thought all this data scooping was to find the bad guys. Are the bad guys really so stupid as to use Apple or Android (or any closed system) to communicate? Cryptonomicon was written 25 year ago.
• Tutanota 3y ago
  That's why we at Tuta do not send any information with the push on Apple and have built our own push notification for Android (we'd never use Google Push): https://tuta.com/blog/posts/open-source-email-fdroid https://tuta.com/blog/posts/open-source-email-fdroid
• devinegan 3y ago
  My startup (LaunchKey, now part of TransUnion) encrypted the data in our push authentication requests as late as a decade ago. This was painful until they expanded the size of the message allowing for more encrypted data. It is possible to do so (I would use pub/priv ec keys now) but remember you are limited in the amount of data you can include so you might need a “pull” to deliver all of the content necessary.