Apparently, Google and Apple are passing on information about push notifications to various services. In a letter to the Attorney General, US Senator Ron Wyden has now pointed this out and called for Apple and Google to be allowed to inform customers and the general public about this.
Push notifications are the small messages that appear on your cell phone, for example, when an email is received or another app notifies you of a message. These can be very different apps, from information about mailings to diet suggestions or sports apps. Such messages are integrated into many of these apps, but they are not sent by the app operators, but are sent via the Apple server for iPhones and via the Google server for Android phones.
Even the content of the messages is often not sent in encrypted form. This means that they can be read by third parties if the server is accessed. But even without this content, the data collected creates a comprehensive profile of the cell phone owner, including movement patterns and contacts. Access to the data collected by the two companies also makes it possible to identify people in other networks.
“In the spring of 2022,” Wyden writes, “my office received a tip that government agencies in other countries were requesting records of push notifications from Google and Apple. My staff followed up on this tip for a year, including contacting Apple and Google. In response to the request, the companies told my staff that the government prohibited the release of this information.”
Wyden does not specify which foreign government agencies are involved. However, the fact that the US government prohibits providing information about this indicates that these are governments allied with the United States. If one remembers the monitoring of the network nodes, it is highly likely that federal authorities are among them.
“Apple and Google should be allowed to deal transparently with legal requests, particularly from foreign governments, just as the companies regularly report on other types of data requests from governments. They should be allowed to generally disclose whether they have been coerced into facilitating these surveillance practices, publish aggregate statistics on the number of requests they have received, and, absent a court order to the contrary, inform individual customers of the request for their data.”
Any cell phone user can check the extent of the information that can be obtained in this way by observing what is contained in their push messages for a while. Users of Telegram and other social networks, for example, regularly receive notifications about new messages on the channels they are subscribed to, which may provide a complete overview of the channels they are subscribed to.
It is urgently necessary to check whether and to what extent German authorities are involved in this practice.
