Turns out cops are super interested in subpoenaing suspects' push notifications

2024-02-29 22:30

More than 130 petitions seeking access to push notification metadata have been filed in US courts, according to a Washington Post investigation - a finding that underscores the lack of privacy protection available to users of mobile devices.

Foreign governments may also demand push notification metadata from Apple, Google, third-party push services, or app developers for their own criminal investigations or political persecutions.

In December 2023, US senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the Justice Department about a tip received by his office in 2022 indicating that foreign government agencies were demanding smartphone push notification records from Google and Apple.

According to the Washington Post, court filings in 14 states and in the District of Columbia demonstrate that investigators are using push notification metadata.

Zach Edwards, a security consultant who runs Victory Medium, told The Register that push notification metadata is extremely valuable to marketing organizations, to app distributors like Apple and Google, and also to government organizations and law enforcement agencies.

He pointed to Pushwoosh as an example of a firm that built its push notification ID using the iOS advertising ID. "The simplest way to think about push notifications," he said, is "They are just like little pre-scheduled messages from marketing vendors, sent via mobile apps. The data that is required to 'turn on any push notification service' is quite invasive and can unexpectedly reveal/track your location/store your movement with a third-party marketing company or one of the app stores, which is merely a court order or subpoena away from potentially exposing those personal details." .

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