The Insecurity of "Push Notifications" and What to Do About It
By now it has been widely circulated that the US government (and their 5 Eyes friends) has been secretly snooping on phone user's messaging in the form of Push Notifications. Not only are they snooping, but they applied a legal gag order to Apple and Google to prevent them from alerting you the customer of this fact. What's that you say? You are using an end-to-end encrypted messenger such as Signal and therefore are safe from said intrusion? Not so fast... While there are indeed some well designed and audited secure chat apps out there, that is only part of the story. Most, if not all, messaging applications employ Push notifications as a way to let you know that someone just reached out to you, even if you didn't happen to have the corresponding application open at the moment. This is, of course, very convenient for the end user, but the problem lies in how this is facilitated on the back end. Apple and Google both employ proprietary servers that intercept a message head
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