Certain governments, with the help of Google and Apple, can access our notifications, these alerts that we receive on the home screen of our smartphones: this revelation comes from an American senator while the American government this times, asked Google and Apple to keep it secret.
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Mobile notifications, in principle, when you activate them on your phone, any mobile application can bring them up on the screen, as soon as information or a message arrives on the smartphone.
Why are the intelligence services interested in it? Can they use notifications to read at least some of the messages you receive? This is the question, particularly regarding WhatsApp, Telegram or even Signal, which encrypt messages end-to-end – and therefore prevent anyone from having access to their content: this encryption is possible, because these messages go directly to one interlocutor to another, in an exchange managed 100% by the publishers of these applications.
On the other hand, notifications partly escape them, because they pass through Apple, for iPhones, and by Google, publisher of Android, the mobile system found in particular on Samsung smartphones. Apple and Google serve, in a way, as technical intermediaries. Everyone has created a service dedicated to these alerts. They ensure that notifications are delivered correctly.
“Apple and Google are in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance.”
Ron Wyden, Democratic Senator from Oregon, in his letter to the Secretary of Justiceto Raphael Satter (Reuters)
These revelations come from Democratic Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden. In an open letter to the American Minister of Justice, dated Wednesday December 6, 2023, and posted online by Raphael Satter (Reuters), he explains having received a tip, in the spring of 2022, according to which government agencies of foreign countries had requested the recordings of these so-called notifications “Push” to Google and Apple.
The senator’s team therefore contacted the two Tech giants, who responded in unison: the American government is preventing us from speaking publicly about this “practice”. And the senator goes further: according to him, “Apple and Google are in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance”. And he adds that, in certain cases, the content of the text displayed on the screen by the notification is part of the accessible data, while the user believes himself to be protected by the end-to-end encryption of the messages in the application.
For greater transparency
However, Ron Wyden did not write to force Google and Apple to say “no” to foreign governments, because he knows: in each country where they are present, Apple and Google have no other choice , if they want to be able to stay there.
On the other hand, the senator from Oregon demands that the two groups be able to communicate on the legal requests they receive, particularly from foreign governments, that they be able to publish statistics on the number of requests that reach them and above all , so that they can warn users who are the subject of surveillance requests.
In any case, we have now been warned: to avoid taking any risks, it is better to deactivate notifications, in particular from instant messaging, SMS and email applications.