Comment on Trump Team Has Full Meltdown Over CNN Story on ICE-Tracking App

• ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It has to do with receiving notifications from the app in a privacy-preserving way. Unless the app is running with a server connection 24/7 (RIP battery life) you need to rely on the OS to deliver notifications.

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  • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You don’t, there’s privacy respecting ways of delivering notifications in android.

    Also, a 24/7 connection to a server isn’t nearly as bad as you might think.

    The connection isn’t active the whole time, it only uses any significant amount of battery if there’s actually data being sent or received. You likely already have quite a few of them anyway, how do you think systems normally listen for push notifications?

    Besides all that, I read in other comments that the privacy issue was the device id firebase needs. Obviously apple also needs some kind of device id, otherwise how do they know where the notifications are going?

    Did some searching, yup apple also needs a unique identifier:

    When it’s time to send a notification, you generate a request that contains the notification data and a unique identifier for the user’s device.

    From …apple.com/…/setting-up-a-remote-notification-ser…

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    • SMillerNL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Apple notification identifiers are unique to an app install and regularly change though, so it’s hardly a device identifier.

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