Honestly I think developers should just use push notifications to tell the app to fetch an update from their server. Or do what Element and Syncthing do, which is bypass that entire Google push infrastructure (FCM, formerly GCM?) and connect to their own ones instead - at the expense of some additional battery consumption, particularly when there’s poor cell service
Comment on Apple Makes It Harder for Police to Access Your Push Notifications
ItsComplicated@sh.itjust.works 6 months agoWould it not make more sense to remove metadata and not even collect it? Maybe have an encrypted protocol for push notifications all developers use regardless of the app?
lemann@lemmy.one 6 months ago
skulblaka@kbin.social 6 months ago
Your phone has to be informed somehow, from the internet, that it has data to present as a notification. The fact that you got a notification at 3:32 and then again at 3:35 is trackable data, pretty much no matter what anyone does with it, encrypted or not. Doubly so if someone has MITM attacked your data stream. They may not know what the notification contains or even what app it was sent to, but the act of transmitting and then receiving this data packet over cell network or internet is a trackable event. And I don't really know what Apple could even do about that beyond attempting to build Internet 2 solely for the purposes of keeping the cops out of it, which is unlikely at best.