← Back to context

Comment by zeratax

20 hours ago

> Or throwing it all away anyways when it's using Apple/Play services for notifications delivery?

What do you mean by "all"

https://www.wired.com/story/phone-notifications-reveal-more-...

Apple, at least, maintained a historical database of your phone's notifications, that it did not clean up after they expired. That includes all notifications from Signal telling you that person XXX has sent you a message that starts YYYY <facepalm>

  • Forgot about that and that def was bad, though imo not really on Signal and would have just as much affected any XMPP app, no? To me this definitely didn't "[throw] it all away" as in your messages were still only on your phone and never decrypted on any server or w/e.

    • Well that's the thing, you just don't know what happens once you let Signal send notifications via Apple/Google - clearly they get them plaintext, and who knows if they're retained and subpoena-able directly from Apple/Google. The leak via notifications DB not being cleaned up is just the shot across the bow. You pay a price for convenience.

      Anyway, I'm not OP, and they have a mad setup (XMPP via Tor) which is a flaky solution most people wouldn't go for. In general, if you're not going to such extreme measures of hiding among the crowd of Tor users to mask your metadata, you're better off directly connecting and hiding among the crowd of Signal users, rather than hosting your own instance.

      2 replies →