this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Would it be possible for Apple to just encrypt this data or, not keep this data? Then there would be nothing to give law enforcement or government. (Forgive my ignorance, I have no idea how all this works.)
The developer of the app sends the push notification through Apple's service. Developers have always been able to encrypt it, at which point it can be decrypted only by their app, but not all developers do this. There's also still limited metadata about the fact that a notification was sent, even if the contents are encrypted.
Would it not make more sense to remove metadata and not even collect it? Maybe have an encrypted protocol for push notifications all developers use regardless of the app?
Honestly I think developers should just use push notifications to tell the app to directly fetch the notification contents from their server, rather than sending the contents of the notification using push, where it is stored by Apple/Google.
Or do what Element and Syncthing do, which is bypass that entire Google push infrastructure (FCM, formerly GCM?) and connect directly to their own ones instead - at the expense of some additional battery consumption, particularly when there's poor cell service. Due to iOS restrictions on background apps, this probably isn't possible on that platform?
Edit: add clarification