Apple admits that the government uses push notifications to monitor your iPhone. This is what you can do about it.
Government can check your iPhone
Thanks to a loophole in the law, the government can monitor your iPhone via push notifications. This was confirmed by Apple this week. Senator Ron Wyden revealed in a letter that governments monitor iPhones by obtaining metadata through Apple’s push notifications.
Push notifications are notifications that you receive when, for example, you receive a new email message or a new notification on X (Twitter). In response, Apple has committed to improving transparency regarding government data requests.
This gives the government access to data from push messages
According to an unnamed source quoted by Reuters, government agencies in countries allied with the US have asked Apple for access to push notification metadata to monitor iPhones. Push notifications containing sensitive information can reveal details about users and their usage of apps. By analyzing the metadata, it is possible to draw conclusions about a user’s activities and behavior.
Although Apple has advised developers not to include sensitive data in the notifications and to encrypt the data, many apps still do not adopt these precautions. Furthermore, the metadata itself is not encrypted during transmission.
Disclosure has so far been prevented
Apple said in a statement that the company was unable to disclose information about these government requests on the iPhone due to government-level gag orders:
“In this case, the US federal government has prohibited us from sharing information. Now that this method has become public, we are updating our transparency reports with details about these types of requests.”
Apple also says it will begin documenting the data requests, which governments use to monitor iPhones, as part of regular transparency reporting. The revelation raises major privacy concerns for iPhone users who rely on receiving important updates and information via push notifications.
Check iPhone: Turn off push notifications
If you don’t want authorities to monitor your iPhone, it is a good idea to disable push notifications on your iPhone. You do this as follows:
- Open the Settings app and tap ‘Notifications’;
- Select an app under ‘Notification style’;
- Turn off the ‘Allow notifications’ option.
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