Apple Gave Governments Data on Thousands of Push Notifications

Israel demanded data related to nearly 700 push notifications as part of a single request.

Rookie numbers IMO. But why "nearly 700" - did Israel already know the quantity of notifications, or was that a number they arrived at with Apple's help?

according to the data, the U.S. made 99 requests for push token data related to 345 different push tokens, and received data in response to 65 of the requests between July and December 2023. The U.K. made 123 requests, about 128 tokens, and received data in response to 111...

These raw numbers are smaller but, based on my relative knowledge, scarier. I believe **tokens don't represent single notifications, they represent all notifications to a single app on your phone **.

So the US is asking for 3-4 apps' worth of notification data per request (person?), and get their way about two-thirds of the time. And I'd assume one token worth of data could contain hundreds, thousands, of notifications.

There's only one app I know about that only uses push notifications to alert apps of incoming messages (without injecting the notification content into the push notification), and that's Signal...

4 comments

Israel demanded data related to nearly 700 push notifications as part of a single request.
Rookie numbers IMO. But why "nearly 700" - did Israel already know the quantity of notifications, or was that a number they arrived at with Apple's help?
according to the data, the U.S. made 99 requests for push token data related to 345 different push tokens, and received data in response to 65 of the requests between July and December 2023. The U.K. made 123 requests, about 128 tokens, and received data in response to 111...
These raw numbers are smaller but, based on my relative knowledge, scarier. I believe **tokens don't represent single notifications, they represent all notifications to a single app on your phone **.
So the US is asking for 3-4 apps' worth of notification data per request (person?), and get their way about two-thirds of the time. And I'd assume one token worth of data could contain hundreds, thousands, of notifications.
There's only one app I know about that only uses push notifications to alert apps of incoming messages (without injecting the notification content into the push notification), and that's Signal...
B-b-but apple cares about users an privacy! They do everything in the nameof sesuriti!
lmao /rekt
I’ve never really checked how they worked. I always believed there was some encryption which, in a way, prevented Apple from seeing the contents of a notification once its sent
This sucks