Those little popups may reveal location, device details, IP address, and more
“App developers can encrypt these messages when they’re stored (in transit they’re protected by TLS) but the associated metadata – the app receiving the notification, the time stamp, and network details – is not encrypted.”
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Tbh I absolutely do not understand why they decided to collect any data for push notifications in the first place. But yea now nobody will fix it. Though I’m wondering if it’s only the proprietary part (Firebase or whatever the name is) or the system itself that collects data. I mean if I use a degoogled phone that doesn’t even have that proprietary part (means notifications from IMSes don’t work either), am I safe from this or not? And does the collected data go to Google or to the app’s developers?
I already explained how the whole push notification thing works in this comment. If you’re using a degoogled phone, you’ll be fine. MicroG has the option to use Firebase but you need to be logged in with a Google account, enable device registration and enable cloud messaging for it to use it. Google has the data about when you got a push notification from what app since it goes through their server and the app developer can obviously log the notification data from their app.
BRUH push notifications with Firebase require everything going through a Google server? What in the deleted is that design?
I don’t like Google either but this design makes perfect sense. There’s a reason UnifiedPush works the same way. It sucks that you can’t choose a different server but that’s just how Google does things.
In my opinion there’s absolutely no point in sending notifications through Google. It can be done differently and in a much less overengineered way. Unification doesn’t make sense here. The additional features don’t work in half of the apps now anyways
If you have a better way to do this, I’d really like to hear it. Also, what additional features are you talking about?
Apps running in the background was how it was done before but it drained a lot of battery, which is why it’s done this way now. Even KDE is implementing UnifiedPush. Things like the Firefox progress bar notification also don’t use this system at all.
Well here it’s a matter of personal preference. For me privacy is more important than battery life and I consider Firebase extremely immoral. It can be different for other people. And thank you for telling about Firefox