Government Surveillance of Apple and Google Users via Push Notifications Raises Concerns, Says US Senator
WASHINGTON: Unknown governments are monitoring smartphone users through push notifications from apps, a US senator warned on Wednesday.
Senator Ron Wyden said in a letter to the Justice Department that foreign authorities are demanding information from Alphabet’s Google and Apple. While details were scarce, the letter offers yet another avenue for governments to track smartphones.
All kinds of apps use push notifications to alert smartphone users of incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are audio or visual indicators that users receive when they receive an email or when their sports team wins a game. Users often don’t realize that almost all such notifications go through Google and Apple’s servers.
That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, which in turn puts them in a “unique position to facilitate government oversight of how users use certain apps,” Wyden said. He called on the Justice Department to “repeal or change any policies” that prevented public discussion about push notification spying.
Apple said in a statement that Wyden’s letter allowed them to share with the public more information about how governments monitor push notifications.
“In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information,” the company said in a statement. “Now that this method has become public, we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these types of requests.”
The Justice Department did not respond to messages seeking comment on the push notification controls or whether Google had stopped Apple from talking about it. Google did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Wyden’s letter cited a “tip” as the source of the surveillance information. His staff did not elaborate on the tip, but a source familiar with the matter confirmed that both foreign and US government agencies have requested metadata related to push notifications from Apple and Google, for example to help link anonymous users of messaging apps to specific Apple or Google accounts.
The source declined to identify the foreign governments involved in making the requests, but described them as US-allied democracies.
The source said they did not know how long such information had been collected in this way.
Most users think little of push notifications, but they have occasionally caught the attention of engineers because of the difficulty of enabling them without sending data to Google or Apple.
Earlier this year, French developer David Libeau said users and developers were often unaware of how their apps were sending information to US tech giants through push notifications, calling them a “privacy nightmare”.
