170
Phone Push Notifications: A Double-Edged Sword for User Privacy and Law Enforcement
(www.theregister.com)
UnifiedPush and Linux mobile to the rescue?
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Time to put pressure on Apple and Google to encrypt these E2E.
Time to put pressure on Apple to allow other push providers and Google to open push providers interface.
Even better, to make other systems than iOS and Android being able to exist.
At this point I’m so irritated that I’ve had it with all the big tech companies and their proprietary horse shit, break up Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, ISPs, and all the ones I’m forgetting, turn the service side of them into public utilities like they should be. Fuck em
Unrelated but does android support that thing where notifications can be encrypted and decryined on device, IE getting a message from signal and having it decrypted in device so you get the actual message and not just "new message" in the notification box
Signal doesn't encrypt notifications from what I understand. It uses Google/Apples notification system like everything else. But the notification only says "Hey, wake up!". Then the Signal app goes and retrieves the message from Signal's servers. That retrieval will be encrypted, but it's outside the push notification system at the point.
Its not about the content of the messages, which csn indeed be encrypted but instead about the metadata of the notifications.
Why is this connected to the Internet? Aren't the notifications coming directly from the app, why do they need to be connected to a server?
Push notifications all go through Google/Apple systems. The apps backend systems sent the notifications to them, who push them to your phone.
Not all. Local notifications are thing. Most do go through soming like FCM though
Not all notifications go through FCM but all push notifications do as far as I'm aware - which is what the previous comment and the post title are talking about.
It is, in fact, worrying for privacy implications on the one hand and a real monopolizing factor on the other since if you wish to deliver an app which needs to implement such notifications you're using Google's service or constantly drain the user's battery.
There's UnifiedPush which tries to provide an open alternative but so far unfortunately still sees very little adoption.
Yeah, that's fair. Push notifications by definition come via the internet. Push and local notifications are indistinguishable to the user
If every app on your phone was constantly running and asking the server for new messages, it would drain a lot of battery. That's why phones instead use a single app that asks a notification server if any new notifications are there. The way it works is if you e.g. get a WhatsApp message, the WhatsApp server tells the notification server that you have a new message, then when the notification app asks that server for new messages, the server will tell it that there's a new WhatsApp notification. Then the notification app wakes up WhatsApp and tells it there's a new notification, then WhatsApp checks for new messages and shows you the notification.
Most apps use Apple's system (whatever it's called) on iOS or Google's Firebase on Android for that. There are also apps that let you use the open standard UnifiedPush, which let's you use any notification app or server you want.
How does the notification daemon in Linux work? It's all local and has been around for ages, why can't we do that?
The applications just run in the background the whole time. KDE was working on implementing UnifiedPush in Plasma but I don't know if it's already implemented or still in the works.
I don't have Google services and no apps with Google Firebase notifications. I don't see any battery draining issues.
Depends on a lot of factors, maybe you're regaining that battery life elsewhere. But it is fact that several apps all doing their own thing will drain more battery than if they all relied on a single service like Firebase or UnifiedPush to wake them up
I haven't found a study that gives exact numbers. Maybe the difference in battery consumption will be 0.5%)