Apple Requires Court Order for Push Notification Data

So government's headline is, of course, Apple makes push notifications spying more difficult

Governments will find push notifications spying harder to do now that they no longer enjoy easy access to records of push notifications sent to iPhone users

Apple changes policy so the law enforcement and other government agencies need a court order to obtain this data now

So this all came up last week when Senator Roy Wyden sent an open letter to Attorney General Garland

you know, alerting the public to this practice. And what's happening is because your push notifications go through an Apple server

there's a record of all this stored. And so particularly for Apple, this was a problem because Apple

all they required was a subpoena to get this information. Google always required a court order

After this news of this came out, then Apple and Google both, you know

came clean isn't the right way to describe it, but they were..

They weren't allowed to talk about it before this report was public. And then once it was made public, then they could admit that they were doing it

Interesting. Somebody leaked it. Strategically. Yeah, open letter. I mean, so that worked out

Apple immediately said, okay, great. Now we can talk about it. We can confirm this is happening

And then, I don't know, within a day or several days, they had already made their policy

different so that it's harder to get access to this data. And you know it like it as mentioned it not as sensitive as like text messages i messages are encrypted end encrypted end But they can people could you know law enforcement could develop information about you

based on these push notifications. What you got, you know, they could figure out where you are

maybe they, they, sometimes the metadata in a push push notification includes text

Like, hi, we're, we'll be at your address, at this address in, you know, 20 minutes

So it is a good thing that now it's harder for law enforcement just get a hold of this stuff, you know, from a privacy perspective

It is possible for more notifications to be encrypted end to end, but a lot of apps aren't done that way

So it's, it's, I took a data processing course in college. It would be trivially easy, even if you only have like basic metadata about the notifications to piece together, who's talking to who, where you are, stuff like that

Like this is, this is kind of. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of a terrible thing that's happening

I thought you were going to say it would be becoming less terrible. Trivially easy to protect and encrypt your notifications end-to-end

So I was like, why aren't they doing it? But it is funny to me that all Apple had to do is just require a court order

Like, that was the solution. I mean, look, if there's a court order, there's a court order, right

But why wasn't Apple doing that in the first place? Yeah, there's kind of a weird question, right

Yeah. Maybe they didn't know that Google was requiring that, and so they didn't know that they were allowed to do that

Oh, interesting. That my theory but maybe they only changed it since they were called out on it This whole gag order stuff man I don know So it like you have the government forcing you to do something but they don let you talk about it

I don't have warm, fuzzy feelings about that, to be honest. I feel like Apple should be allowed to say

hey, everyone, just so you know, here's how, you know, things are working

and we just want you to know that this might be something you might want to pay attention to

Because if your notifications can be farmed by a government, and they can probably learn all sorts of stuff about you

then what's the purpose of having all the privacy built into the iPhone

If all that information can just be pulled from your notifications, every app that I have sends me notifications about everything

So it seems like they could probably, you know, as Griffin said

piece together most stuff that I thought was private. There's a lot of things I'm trying to hide, Lewis

You know that. Oh, sure. Not as many as LK. I mean, I don't have an open investigation from the DEA that I know of

but I guess they don't tell you, do they? Not a secret investigation

I think this probably matters even more in other countries, you know, being able to pull stuff and get information on people where there may not be as many privacy rules as we have here in the U.S

I don't know. This seems important everywhere. Anything else to add to this story, Lewis, or should we go ahead and just move on

Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's that much to add to it. It's just an interesting

It was like a weird privacy loophole, you know, and the law enforcement and governments

around the world figured out how to do it. And it I agree with you I mean it is bizarre that Apple had such a low bar for getting that information Yeah Well when you working with the government I can imagine that you maybe aren quite sure how to proceed because you don want to like do something illegal

But just saying that out loud, Apple has the best lawyers in the world

I was going to say, yeah. I mean, it's their job to know this, right

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the more interesting follow-ups to this story

from like eight years ago when there was the whole Apple versus the FBI thing

If you don't remember the details, it was like the FBI had this phone, they wanted Apple to

write a special version of iOS that would allow them to like break into the phone

And the most interesting part of the follow-up to that story is that when Apple executives received that court order

like their whole executive team basically hold up in a meeting room and like outlined all of the

every possible response they could have for like the next 24, 28 hours until they finally

deliberated and came up with their solution to actually like push back and fight against the FBI on it

Wow. So they take this stuff seriously. I can't imagine what Tim Cook's life is like

He just, I mean, how could you have a family and be an executive at Apple

The company commands your every moment. All these urgent things that pop up, they don't care if you're asleep

They don't care if you're at a birthday party. You have to figure stuff out on the

fly, react to things instantly. Apple must just be their lives. It's all that they do

I wonder how many of them even have kids. Does Craig Federigi have like a family? I don't even know