this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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How is getting a push notification any better at tracking someone than the actual gps and tower data that their phone is CONSTANTLY sending out to their cell providers?
Seems really overblown, like most people hearing this assume it's including contents of the notifications but it doesn't, and if law enforcement wants to put a suspect at a crime scene, they can just get the data from T-Mobile, if it gets to the point they're asking Google or Apple for info, id be much more concerned about all the data and emails stored on the cloud, which they already have no problems giving out.
Am I missing something? What can law enforcement gain from push notification data that they can't get with data from the cell provider already or the wealth of other data collected by Gmail, maps, Uber, etc, which is way more useful than anything a push notification would contain.
Not defending the practice of course, I don't get push notifications because I don't have Google apps installed on my grapheneOS phone, but I'm pretty sure T-Mobile knows my location just as well.
I think the whole thing is that it's a class of data that has very few privacy protections on it and is therefore more easily accessible by assholes
If we're talking about these agencies subpoenaing in order to get the data, that kinda sounds like privacy protections are in place for it. I think whats really happening here is that push data is now one of a hundred or so other things (like emails, google/app maps data, web search history), that's now being included when agencies make requests for a users data... they arent specifically going after push notifications any more then they're going after how many steps your fitbit is counting, they just want all the information they can get, and by voluntarily giving it to these companies we put ourselves at risk, its a very distopian trade off.