this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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How is getting a push notification any better at tracking someone than the actual gps and tower data that their phone is CONSTANTLY sending out to their cell providers?
Seems really overblown, like most people hearing this assume it's including contents of the notifications but it doesn't, and if law enforcement wants to put a suspect at a crime scene, they can just get the data from T-Mobile, if it gets to the point they're asking Google or Apple for info, id be much more concerned about all the data and emails stored on the cloud, which they already have no problems giving out.
Am I missing something? What can law enforcement gain from push notification data that they can't get with data from the cell provider already or the wealth of other data collected by Gmail, maps, Uber, etc, which is way more useful than anything a push notification would contain.
Not defending the practice of course, I don't get push notifications because I don't have Google apps installed on my grapheneOS phone, but I'm pretty sure T-Mobile knows my location just as well.
You can even read message contents sometimes. You know what apps they are using and can precisely correlate messages with those services
This.
If there’s a notification for an encrypted group chat, you can use that metadata to identify the devices of all parties involved in that chat, because the push system has to queue all that up and send it at the same time.
That’s just one valuable use of this data.