U.S. Senator Ron Wyden warned that foreign governments are spying on smartphone users by compelling Apple and Google to turn over push notification records
Curious about this too. From what I could find, for those it seems like the push is being used to wake up the app and tell it to connect to the server where it grabs the data and then creates the notification locally. Even if a bare minimum is used there is room for traffic analysis, and I imagine Google can easily tell the app being targeted for the push, but it shouldn’t mean the contents of the displayed notification are necessarily what was sent through the server. It’s hard to find info without digging because consumer-facing stuff just calls every notification a push notification.
The alternative is an app keeping a constant connection open to the server, which understandably mobile OSs don’t like. With push only the one service needs to keep an open connection to provide updates for all the apps.
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Curious about this too. From what I could find, for those it seems like the push is being used to wake up the app and tell it to connect to the server where it grabs the data and then creates the notification locally. Even if a bare minimum is used there is room for traffic analysis, and I imagine Google can easily tell the app being targeted for the push, but it shouldn’t mean the contents of the displayed notification are necessarily what was sent through the server. It’s hard to find info without digging because consumer-facing stuff just calls every notification a push notification.
The alternative is an app keeping a constant connection open to the server, which understandably mobile OSs don’t like. With push only the one service needs to keep an open connection to provide updates for all the apps.