Just don’t use push, almost all of the privacy respecting apps have their own notifications
And also, there’s ntfy for some (hope to be more widespread)
Governments spying on Apple and Google users through phone notifications, U.S. senator says
Submitted 11 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to privacyguides@lemmy.one
DangerousInternet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Anyone could explain how push messages work? Let’s think about WhatsApp or Signal notifications, they contains lots of data, even if we think only about metadata, that is also a lot, if you try to find someone and examine tons of anonymous pushes to find ‘that needed’ ones? Seems possible. Um…
AnEilifintChorcra@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
For android, Google uses Firebase Cloud Messaging, basically a server that pings the phone when a notification for an app is available, which wakes the app up to receive the notification. There are alternatives but they need to be adopted by app devs for them to work.
For people running a degoogled android, they’ll notice most apps won’t receive any notifications until they open the apps since most apps rely on Google Play Services to receive a ping from FCM.
I don’t have any google play services so most of my apps don’t give me push notifications but I do have WhatsApp installed and that still receives notifications, they’re sometimes delayed by a few minutes which makes me think Meta have their own implementation/alternative to FCM but I’m not sure.
For Signal, their servers tell Googles FCM servers that you have notifications waiting on Signals servers and to wake up your Signal app so it can communicate with Signals servers to receive your messages.
WhatsApp and Signal claim/have end-end encryption on their messages but that shouldn’t matter when specifically looking at Googles FCM servers so, at most it would be meta data that could be obtained from the FCM servers.
jami.net/unifiedpush/ has a pretty basic explanation of push notifications on android and also showcases an alternative to FCM unifiedpush.org which has a nice little diagram about push notifications on android. Unfortunately, Unifiedpush is not widely adopted by many applications.
So there are ways to avoid Googles FCM servers on android using Unifiedpush or always having the application on in the background but for the most part FCM is used.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 11 months ago
Never had issues with Element, Fair Email, Silence notifying me? I run LineageOS without Play.
DangerousInternet@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Thanks. I also found, that push encryption is not native and requires extra work and libraries to implement, not all devs would care about it.
Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
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, 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 consimer-facing stuff just calls every notification a push notification.