Posted on 12/07/2023 8:01:44 AM PST by mikelets456
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps' push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.
Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible "dings" or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple's servers.
That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps," Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to "repeal or modify any policies" that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
This is why I DO NOT turn that crap on.
Don’t put apps on your phone(s) (yes I know, some are preloaded). If you are an Apple user, get an iPad for that instead and don’t travel with it turned on.
I personally and not worried about being tracked by the government (although the idea of it generally speaking is very disappointing), but I don’t trust app developers, and I wouldn’t use tiktok of you paid me to.
Anybody that is too stupid to know that their smartphone receives messages from the apps that they sign up for, is too stupid to use a smartphone.
It should, because the plan is to surveil you into submission & total control of everything you can do:
Unfortunately the push notification data goes to the back-end Apple/Google servers regardless of if you allow it to ding you at the user level.
Anybody that is too stupid to know that their smartphone receives messages from the apps that they sign up for, is too stupid to use a smartphone.
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Most people just don’t think that way. They don’t think about much at all, let alone about something like this.
Yes, if you asked them about it, they would be able to answer affirmatively that their apps can receive pushes. ‘So what?’ Many of them would tell you that it’s actually a convenience to get notifications.
But if you flesh out the fact that you are not using your apps like some old school browser worked, and it’s not some mundane request & response protocol, so the software companies can decide to send to your phone any time they wanted too, the light might start to come on a little.
Just a little. You’d probably still get a shrug out of them though. ‘So what?’
People don’t know that data aggregation has been around for decades. All your software and hardware usage habits are being stored, and almost never anonymously. Where you go... The times you are active... What you buy... What you search... Those are old school. It all gets sold, and the buyers aren’t all just trying to sell ads. These days, we have graduated to being able to assess who are you in physical contact with, or travel with, and probably how you are traveling, in real time. Even aggregating your credit rating, DNA genome, criminal record, etc. is not a nothing new at all.
Not all of that is done with data pushes, but that sure makes it easier. Even with GPS turned off, carriers automatically triangulate your position to multiple towers (for better service, of course).
I don’t work in any industry related to this stuff, and even I know this. But people just don’t care how anything works, as long as their little distractions keep working.
Good post—it is the banality of evil.
I am old fashioned and refuse to download any Apps—and I use an el cheapo cell phone—and that only to make calls when absolutely necessary.
I forgot to mention biometrics. Stuff like fingerprinting for device access has been around for a while, but they really want to push this stuff. For your personal security, of course. heh. Law enforcement wants license plate readers, facial recognition, and real time tracing. In many places they already do. I don’t blame them. I know I would want it if I worked in law enforcement. But law enforcement aren’t the developers of this technology. They are just consumers of it.
Think about that a little bit.
Well, I’m guilty. Phone has 499 apps as Cache Cleaner counts them (user+system), but am with you in rarely if ever using thr phone for voice calls.
Maybe setting the cell phone VPN to Vietnam or China will confuse them?
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