Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users

[zakarhino]

When governments force companies, private citizens, to keep secrets from the public, you know you're on the road to communism or worse.

We've been doing this in our non-communist countries for close to a century and yet still no communism, just more of a gradual tilt towards feudalism if anything. Man that commie road sure is long, winding, and taking plenty of detours. These Western communists must really suck if all they've managed to do is bolster corporate interests and make the country even more terrified of The Great Communist Threat™️ from China.

 

[thefourthpope]

I’m trying to understand what this means. Are they wanting to read the content of the push, or link the basic use of an app to a particular user?

Ex: I get a WhatsApp push. Is my government after the knowledge that it’s me getting that push?

It doesn’t seem like this is suggesting they’re trying to read the notifications.

Not downplaying severity, just trying to suss out the details. The linked Reuters article doesn’t offer much; MR basically reprinted the whole thing.

 

[thefourthpope]

We've been doing this in our non-communist countries for close to a century and yet still no communism, just more of a gradual tilt towards feudalism if anything. Man that commie road sure is long, winding, and taking plenty of detours. These Western communists must really suck if all they've managed to do is bolster corporate interests and make the country even more terrified of The Great Communist Threat™️ from China.

It’s always just around the corner AND the only possible threat

 

[displayblock]

No the notifications are sent from a third party and routed through Apple's servers to actually get to the iPhone. When a dev sends a notification, they send it to Apple and Apple delivers it to you. That's the point of this article. So yes, while I agree with OP that a Little Snitch style easy firewall for iOS would be awesome, unless you're blocking Apple's servers (which renders the iPhone useless) a firewall does nothing on this one.

Even if you block your own access to Apple servers, your third-party app may still be sending push notifications to Apple’s servers with instructions to send it to your Apple ID/devices. That’s all that’s needed to tie the third-party account to your Apple account. You don’t even need to receive the notification.

 

[crawfish963]

Dirty as. Bet UK is one of them. Guess the solution is to turn off all push notifications?

Unfortunately this is just one small method they use that we know about. Having worked in government, specifically the digital forensics side of it, I can tell you that alphabet agencies have tools and tech we can’t even imagine and likely know this information already. We are screwed.

 

[zakarhino]

Even if you block your own access to Apple servers, your third-party app may still be sending push notifications to Apple’s servers with instructions to send it to your Apple ID/devices. That’s all that’s needed to tie the third-party account to your Apple account. You don’t even need to receive the notification.

Exactly. Now let's say you get rid of Apple's push system altogether. Well you can still analyze packet info to make very good guesses as to who's communicating with who. Maybe not the content, but certainly enough to draw relationship patterns. This is how advanced governments already do things I imagine.

Speaking of which, it's always baffled me how many employees from government 'security' institutions transition into extremely high paying jobs in places like the UAE/Saudi Arabia to do the same job they were doing at home but for a foreign country. Ethics of mass domestic spying aside, you would think there would be bans on that sort of thing. We're basically letting people design/peer into our security apparatus and then take everything they've learnt to another country. How the hell is that legal.

 

[klasma]

Makes me feel good about having disabled push notifications for absolutely everything except weather and texts. I DESPISE push notifications.

That said, it sounds like it's time for Apple to require push notifications to be encrypted, or they don't pass them along.

You probably only have disabled the reception/display of push notifications. They are still being sent (given that it’s not your iPhone that sends them, but cloud services).

 

[ImageWrangler]

Russia
China
the entire EU

I mean seriously, any country without a constitution prohibiting this is likely involved in this behavior. I wouldn't put this past Canada or Australia.

Mexico? I doubt they have the manpower to deal with this. They can't even track stop the corruption within a municipal office, let alone tracking millions of people. Maybe the drug lords use this stuff. I wouldn't put it past Apple to deal with the mob if they could earn a profit doing so.

The Saudis. 100%.

The reason the Saudi Royal family tossed Musk a few billion to buy Twitter wasn't some charity act. Unlike the other investors in that financial sinking ship dumpster fire, they're not asking for their money back. Their few billion was in exchange for pretty much each and every journalists Twitter account details, private messages, locations of tweets, especially ones the royals see as targets they now have data on so those journalists can be followed, threatened, or Putin'd.

Realize the Saudi Royal Family are quintillionaires, nobody really knows how wealthy they are but it'd make Phony Stark, Jeff Bozos, Gates, Warren Buffet look financially like homeless people. The Prince is all about paranoia and loves spying with the occasional guy doing suicide by shooting himself in the back several times while throwing himself off a balcony.

He's so paranoid he's even paid millions in hiring Israel's top secret global spy NSO Group and is known to use their Pegasus software. As in, even as an evil dictator who's faith hates the Jews you'll happily give them money to keep tabs on people, and the Saudi's gladly do, and Israeli's NSO gladly takes their money.

The Saudis have also paid hundreds of millions to the US military in exchange for information.

You better believe Saudis are involved here.

Granted, if you're not one of the several hundred-thousands on their global watch list probably don't be too worried but if you are, yeah, may want to go back to a flip phone.

 

[SoGood]

Oops, NSA's current surveillance tool just got exposed.

 

[GeoStructural]

Israel, Mexico and the UK are probably the first ones that come to mind

I was thinking more like Saudi Arabia.

 

[toobravetosave]

Apple should pull out of the United States instead of caving to such ridiculous demands!

 

[foliovision]

Russia
China
the entire EU

I mean seriously, any country without a constitution prohibiting this is likely involved in this behavior. I wouldn't put this past Canada or Australia.

Specifically says a democracy allied with the United States, not Russia or China. That's most likely the UK, could be Canada or Australia. Less likely to be EU as EU laws mostly make this kind of surveillance illegal.

 

[Dylan33x]

Israel, Mexico and the UK are probably the first ones that come to mind

I was thinking more Australia and Canada

 

[Dylan33x]

This was literally the reason behind all the pushback on Apple’s proposed CSAM prevention method. That a government would force them to use it for surveillance and then gag order them.

 

[ashdelacroix]

Specifically says a democracy allied with the United States, not Russia or China. That's most likely the UK, could be Canada or Australia. Less likely to be EU as EU laws mostly make this kind of surveillance illegal.

I'm afraid you are very naive about EU law if you think that will make any difference to what national governments request from corporations.

 

[Apple Fan 2008]

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is why you can never trust the people in power.

 

[Superhai]

Russia
China

I believe the reference was to which allied (of the US) democracy that was referenced.

 

[SoldOnApple]

Is it really a transparency report if you're only transparent when you're forced to?

Unfortunately Apple must follow the laws of the countries they operate in.

 

[zakarhino]

The guy that suggested Mexico is probably bang on the money.

Saudi is crossed off the list because while there's no doubt they're already doing this nobody thinks they're a democracy. The UK, Germany, France, Australia, etc. are all doing this (and then some) without question but the USA has no interest in pointing figures at their important "ally" states for doing the same thing they're already doing (Apple said they were federally barred from talking about this until the senator mentioned it, why would that be?)

So why Mexico? Well the USA are not happy with them at the moment because they're not bowing down to [insert US corp here] enough. That's not a darn communist conspiracy either, that's straight from leaked documents that mention how unhappy the USA is with Mexico prioritizing social spending over the interests of the USA.

So what a great opportunity to hypocritically point the finger at Mexico to stir up even more division in that country and justify some future sanctions or whatever against them if they even think about joining BRICS. It's all too transparent and they'll probably openly say it's Mexico in the coming months.

Case closed.

The U.S. Is Unhappy That Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens

Mexico’s populist president should instead be spending more on furthering U.S. interests, according to a leaked intelligence document.

theintercept.com

 

[Sorinut]

Apple should pull out of the United States instead of caving to such ridiculous demands!

There are no (zero) countries that don't do this, or at least with to.

 

[sparkinstx]

Mexico was (if not) the first and still the biggest client of Pegasus. They actually used it to spy on the parents of the missing / murdered college students a few years ago for example

edit: found a source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/world/americas/pegasus-spyware-mexico.html

there is actually a trial happening right now against the former president of Mexico

Pegasus spyware trial implicating former president kicks off in Mexico

A far-reaching Pegasus scandal in Mexico went to court Monday with prosecutors focused on how the spyware targeted one of the country’s most celebrated investigative journalists and other prominent Mexicans, including the billionaire Carlos Slim.

therecord.media

Thanks for those links - must go read about it.

 

[toobravetosave]

There are no (zero) countries that don't do this, or at least with to.

It is a joke.

It is also an established fact that america and allies spy on each other and share the data because they aren't allowed to just spy on their own citizens.

 

[CarAnalogy]

Is it really a transparency report if you're only transparent when you're forced to?

I believe you have it backwards. They wanted to tell us this the whole time but they were specifically prohibited from doing so.

 

[sparkinstx]

Your post is wrong on many levels:

Objectively speaking... To start, it's not the iPhone that is being targeted, it is the notifications being pushed towards it. If you actually read the article, you would know that these notifications can be encrypted but it depends on the developer, not Apple.

Secondly, the iPhone itself is still safeguarded, governments, as always, just found a technicality to access data.

Yes, this would be any kind of mobile phones that receive push notifications.

 

[antiprotest]

Is it really a transparency report if you're only transparent when you're forced to?

In this case, not "forced to" but "allowed to." Which is also a problem, of course.