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Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

reuters.com

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Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#541

Post by datenyan »

steelframe wrote: post #533
jay-barronville wrote: post #425

Legitimately scary stuff but not surprising. Snowden risked everything to tell us what was going on and where things were headed yet here we are. At this point, it seems the only way to not be subject to this type of treatment by our governments is to completely unplug from the system, but of course, practically speaking, this isn’t feasible for the overwhelming majority of our society. So what are the alternatives h…

> So what are the alternatives here? You have to be willing to live with something less feature-rich than what you can get on the latest iPhone 27 Max Pro(TM). And you have to be gutsy enough to click an "Install some other OS" button in your web browser with your phone plugged into a USB port. Then to extend to services, a lot of it depends on your ability to deploy your own stuff. This can involve a lot of time rea…

> You have to be willing to live with something less feature-rich than what you can get on the latest iPhone 27 Max Pro(TM). And you have to be gutsy enough to click an "Install some other OS" button in your web browser with your phone plugged into a USB port.

I agree with all of this, but realistically it's not just a simple matter of being willing to live with less features - this is a significant amount of work to investigate, implement, and upkeep for someone who is techy, let alone a less technically-inclined person.

I can barely get my family to use Signal, let alone install F-Droid or learn how to configure Syncthing.

Ultimately, this does indeed come down to "if you use a big product, you're likely being spied on", but this shouldn't be the individual consumer's fault.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#542

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

standardUser wrote: post #498
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This legal structure of governance already kills so many people unintentionally, it's unethical to keep trying to reform it when it was designed from flawed principles. Time for a full redesign.

And if they shoot you dead first, you're cool with that? For the cause?

I mean, I'm already a target for various things/reason. That's why I'm an advocate for viral movements so we hit a point where the movement's so large, we skip over the part of the process where killing us would be an effective means of stopping the movement.

But yeah, I'm not going to let threat of death keep me from plowing forward. Embracing death is part of death practice. I'm still going to move forward playfully and through harm reduction.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#543

Post by mistermann »

soraminazuki wrote: post #415
iwontberude wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing there is no penalties for lying under oath anymore. That pesky rule of law was so long in the tooth.

There are instead life destroying penalties being handed out to whistleblowers. What a world we live in.

The good thing is we live in a democracy - if we don't like it, we can fix it at the voting booth.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#544

Post by flemhans »

steelframe wrote: post #533
jay-barronville wrote: post #425

Legitimately scary stuff but not surprising. Snowden risked everything to tell us what was going on and where things were headed yet here we are. At this point, it seems the only way to not be subject to this type of treatment by our governments is to completely unplug from the system, but of course, practically speaking, this isn’t feasible for the overwhelming majority of our society. So what are the alternatives h…

> So what are the alternatives here? You have to be willing to live with something less feature-rich than what you can get on the latest iPhone 27 Max Pro(TM). And you have to be gutsy enough to click an "Install some other OS" button in your web browser with your phone plugged into a USB port. Then to extend to services, a lot of it depends on your ability to deploy your own stuff. This can involve a lot of time rea…

We are headed in a direction where you will need the Google Play store or Apple's store to do groceries, read messages from the government, use two-factor authentication, pay, show your ID, order food, and much more. Web sites are being phased out and so are physical / legacy alternatives.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#545

Post by Klonoar »

fsflover wrote: post #349
Klonoar wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Librem needs to do something PR-wise to fix the reputation they developed regarding massive product/delivery delays. They exist in the frustrating spot of “I want to like them, but I can’t trust the purchase based off of everyone I know who tried getting burned, so now I’ll just look at a Pinephone because it’s easier”.

I don't understand how delays of preorders are relevant today, when the devices are available within 10 working days.

Call me when a glance at the Purism subreddit isn't people still complaining about problems here. ;P

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#546

Post by kccqzy »

hedora wrote: post #438
zeppelin101 wrote: post #399

This reminds me, whatever happened to mesh networks? If you wanted to be out and about in public, you could simply carry a very anonymized device that had only more basic abilities. But among those abilities, you could certain send messages and maybe even smaller-sized files - all over a mesh network. Feds could infiltrate it, but it wouldn't be nearly as trivial as it is right now. And users could rotate their devic…

Apple AirDrop was basically this, but they neutered it at the request of the Chinese government. It still works, but it automatically turns itself off every 30 minutes, so you can't (for instance) opt-in to allowing people to automatically push uncensored news to your phone during your daily commute (without interacting with the phone every half hour). (It isn't technically a mesh, since it doesn't support multi-hop…

A better example is perhaps Apple's Find My network in which they explicitly said that locations of your Apple devices (including AirTags) would be transmitted over a mesh network and eventually to Apple's servers so you can see them on your iCloud console.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#547

Post by sowbug »

1oooqooq wrote: post #536
sowbug wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read at least the summary of James Scott's Seeing Like a State ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State ) and let the concept of legibility percolate for a bit. Governments view legibility of their constituencies as a feature, not a bug. They want to be able to query the population like a database in order to manage it better. This is exactly like a product manager at a tech company who wants to know wheth…

Oh boy. I was shaking my head in agreement while reading your comment, until that part: > Why HNers are pro-VPN but anti-Bitcoin, when both stand for privacy and censorship resistance at the price of reduced legibility, is beyond me. neither vpn nor btc are "for privacy and censorship resistance". Maybe in some dystopian neoliberal every-man-is-an-island way. I think you were thinking about "overlay networks (tor et…

The actual mechanisms don't matter that much. The point is not letting government or big corporations default to being the gatekeepers for (or monitors of) basic -- and legal -- social activities like communicating or transferring value. Information technology has shrunk the world, but our rights shouldn't also shrink.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#548

Post by kccqzy »

forward1 wrote: post #326
yohannparis wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable notifications on all applications you do not want to be tracked via metadata.

Absolutely and confidently incorrect. Local notification settings have no bearing on this metadata, which is generated, collected and stored with your consent by using Apple/Google app stores.

Wait. Are you saying that even if I disable notifications on my phone, the app backends will continue to send notifications to Apple and Google only to be ignored? If this is the way it is intended to work, I find that hard to believe.

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#549

Post by philsnow »

uoaei wrote: post #187
beretguy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, don’t have Twitter account and/or app installed and you should be good?

Protip: the harder a company pushes you to download their app, the more they have to gain from it. 99.999% of the time it's because they want access to as much of your data as they can sneak out of your device, usually for selling it. One notable corollary is, the shittier the mobile browser webapp implementation is, the more they want to push people onto their app. See: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

> the shittier the mobile browser webapp implementation is, the more they want to push people onto their app. See: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit

Yelp is the gold standard in this regard, blithely pretending that they can't show you any photos (or is it more than a few photos? I avoid yelp on mobile so much I can't recall). It's probably the right move for them, because the photos are 99% of the reason I ever want to use Yelp. Reviews can be outright lies or simply written by people ~~with no taste~~ whose tastes are not simpatico with mine, but photos don't lie*.

* well, nowadays I guess they can

Re: Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications

#550

Post by _rdvw »

uoaei wrote: post #307
loughnane wrote: post #284

I know Pinephone isn't ready for daily use from all the threads here, but I just ordered one to get some stick time with it. Getting real tired of having to fight my phone to keep my data mine. I just want the equivalent of debian, but on mobile. I understand I'll have to give up a bunch of apps, but honestly I think its worth it. As soon as its possible I'd like off this ride.

I'm sure you did your research. I'm writing for other readers who are interested. There are a few alternatives, more can be found but this is a selection of the most prominent offerings. /e/OS: https://e.foundation/e-os/ GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ PostmarketOS (based on Alpine Linux rather than Android, and what's used in Pinephones): https://po…

Some of these are not like others: https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
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