Interesting, especially with GrapheneOS people shooting it down immediately to call them out on their baloney.
Comment on Trump Team Has Full Meltdown Over CNN Story on ICE-Tracking App
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 days agothey mentioned that its because push notifications require device id and that would make it easy to be tracked if aubpoenaed.
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 days ago
poopkins@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Push notifications though GMS don’t use the device ID; they use a generated GCM registration ID that occasionally rotates. Who knows what Google uses internally to associate GCM reg IDs to users, but to overly state that it uses device IDs is simply not correct.
I’m not suggesting push notifications are inherently secure because it’s impossible to make that determination from the outside. But their assessment is incorrect and the same privacy concerns apply to Apple.
forrgott@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
I’m pretty certain push notifications have been shown to be grossly insecure actually…
Ulrich@feddit.org 5 days ago
I’m not sure if this guy is just dumb or it’s a honeypot.
As mentioned elsewhere, they don’t use device ID
Android is the only platform that supports alternative push methods
Apple knows everyone who downloads this app, which is subject to subpoena
The gov has been collecting push notification data from both Apple and Google for a long time. It would be as simple as knowing when notifications went out and then comparing timestamps to figure out who is using the app.
The app is closed-source
It would take significantly more mental energy on the part of the user but it would be far safer (which is extremely important in this specific case, as the dev agrees) to distribute through F-Droid and then use some other UnifiedPush implementation, as many Android apps already do. Anyone using this app is making themselves a huge target for the current authoritarian state.