Marcus "MajorLinux" SummersWell, this ain't great!
FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database
#FBI #ACAB #Signal #Notifications #iPhone #Apple #Surveillance #Privacy #Tech
But, honestly, if there was a database of cached notifications just sitting on my phone, why wasn't that exposed to the user?
Imagine how many notifications we "thought we saw" or notifications that we accidentally swiped away in a hurry because another one popped up.
Also, if notifications were being dealt with and it wasn't being surfaced to the user, why were they being cached in the first place?!
Who's fucked up idea was to even keep them there?
Elle 💗@majorlinux This is their source
https://prairielanddefendants.com/court-notes/march-10-federal-trial-day-12/
which is a thorough notetaking of the trial. The notes state
"Messages were recovered from Sharp’s phone through Apple’s internal notification storage — Signal had been removed, but incoming notifications were preserved in internal memory."
This is a description from a fed through a notetaker's summarized interpretation, so the technical details are going to be fuzzy. They do list partial messages recovered shown in evidence.
March 10: Federal Trial Day 12 - Support the Prairieland Defendants
Both sides rested and closed their cases after a day dominated by the prosecution's effort to connect the defendants to Antifa ideology through social media, phone extractions, and chat messages. Judge Pittman questioned the relevance of the Antifa evidence.
@ellesaurus I'm going to need both Apple and Signal to address this.
However, seeing as that Signal was removed from the device, I don't think Signal is at fault.
We can't just keep using black boxes. Apple needs to start spelling out how it is protecting our data if they still want to claim to be that champion.
Jenny753@majorlinux @ellesaurus Signal does have an option to limit notifications to names only, or just a general "signal" notification with no names or content. (I recommend adjusting that setting ASAP.)
What surprises me most is I would think removing the app altogether would wipe the on-device cache.
@jenny753 While that's a nice stop-gap, the collection of those notifications after they have been handled needs to be disabled.
I say this as someone who is actively using Signal during actions and its great to get notifications on my watch and can dismiss them as needed without having to pull out my phone.
@majorlinux The article was confusing for that. Is it a persistent cache of notifications that had been received before the app was removed?
Or were the push notifications still being received after the app was deleted?
@jenny753 The notifications still persisted after the removal of the app.
If there was nothing to push to, then there'd be no notifications to cache.
So, essentially, they got caught up in thinking that if they deleted Signal, the messages would be gone from the device, not thinking that iOS was storing the message data in the notifications cache which DIDN'T get purged when the app was deleted.
@majorlinux Thank you for helping explain it to me!
@jenny753 I hope I did it justice.
🜏 Techate 🜏@majorlinux @ellesaurus , for Android Users,
If it has been on, this alleges to delete all the notification history when turned off. If notification content only is a concern, proceed to customize app notification content before turning it back on if that is desired.
Settings >> Notifications >> Advanced settings >> Notification History: Toggle Off
When it comes to regard future notification content:
In Signal >> Settings >> Notifications >> Show: No Name or Message, or Name Only at most.