Comment on Apple Makes It Harder for Police to Access Your Push Notifications
Steve@communick.news 9 months agoBut why would a copy of the notification history exist outside of the phone itself? I can’t think of a reason why notifications should be collected at all.
there’s a lot of different reasons why it might exist, depending on how the app or service work. some might have no data history, some might have a lot with a long footprint. some apps/services may benefit from rethinking how their app/services handles/routes this data.
it’s complicated.
But that’s just an individual app collecting its own history. That makes sense.
Apple or Google collecting all notifications seems like data collection for its own sake, with no real useful purpose.
oh, I se the misunderstanding— you’re confusing simple on-device app notifications with notifications using the Push service, which actually requires being sent through Apple’s or Google’s servers and may originate outside or your device from a service on a 3rd-party server.
Oh! I didn’t realize they actually went through Google or Apple servers. Not sure why that’s a necessary step, but at least it explains why they would have the data at all.
Thanks
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Imagine you have 20 apps that can send receive notifications from remote (messaging apps, offers, updates…). That would require each app to be active in the background and pulling updates. That’s a massive battery drain.
Instead, the apps send the notifications to Apple/Google, and the OS checks for all of the apps. The apps don’t need to be awake (the OS could show the notification or wake the app) and there’s only one service checking for the ml notifications.
It’s a massive oversimplifying and probably I made some mistakes, but that’s my understanding. Hopefully somebody can correct me.
Steve@communick.news 9 months ago
Apparently that’s how it works.
I’d imagine a notification service on the phone that can receive or pull from all the various sources on behalf of the apps installed. That way the app servers don’t need to hand the data to Apple/Google servers. It just seems like an extra step.
kautau@lemmy.world 9 months ago
On Apple, there’s only one notification service. All notifications get pushed through …wikipedia.org/…/Apple_Push_Notification_service which go through Apple’s servers
pup_atlas@pawb.social 9 months ago
By doing it that way, you are all the sudden generating tens, if not hundreds of requests per minute to grab notifications for every platform and service, rather than just the one. With a unified approach, the phone can wake up in the background every 5 minutes and ping Google to ask for notifications. If everyone did it individually, your phone would never be able to go to sleep, and would CONSTANTLY be sending out requests to random servers. That also brings up security concerns, since you can get a vague idea of location data from a request, any app that can send notifs can soft track users. They would also open the door for one to be compromised, and send malicious info much easier than it would be to do thru Google. All around, its just a worse solution to the problem with one very small benefit.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Well, the problem is that every would need to have their own server with notifications waiting to be pulled (imagine your phone goes offline) and they need to be beefy enough to answer potentially thousands of requests per second. Almost impossible for small devs.
There’s also additional battery need, as it’s many calls and payloads, and if a server is slow it can affect all the other notifications. Plus more area of attack.
Not impossible, but I don’t think it’s the direction things will go.