US Senator Revealed A Foreign Government Peeking At Smartphone Users Through Push Notifications

United States Senator Ron Wyden (photo: x @RonWyden)

JAKARTA - Senator of the United States, Ron Wyden, warned that foreign governments are supervising smartphone users through their application push notifications.

In his letter to the Department of Justice, Wyden stated that foreign officials requested the data from Alphabet and Apple's Google. Although the details are minimal, the letter opens a new way for the government to track smartphone devices.

Applications rely on push notifications to tell smartphone users about incoming messages, the latest news, and other updates. This notification is in the form of a visual voice or indicator that appears when the user receives an email or a sports team message they win the match. What is often not realized by users is almost all of these notifications through Google and Apple servers.

"This gives the two companies to be unique to data traffic from these applications to their users, and in turn, place them" in a unique position to facilitate government supervision of how users use certain applications, "Wyden said.

He asked the Department of Justice to "revoke or modify any policies" that hampered public discussions about the spy of push notifications.

In a statement, Apple said that a letter from Wyden gave them the opportunity to share more details with the public about how the government monitored the Push notification.

"In this case, the federal government forbids us to share any information," the company said in a statement. "Now this method has become a public, we will update our transparency report to explain this kind of request."

The Department of Justice does not give a response regarding the push notification survey or whether they have prevented Apple or Google from discussing it. Google does not respond to messages looking for comments.

Wyden's letter quoted "Information" as a source of information about the survey. The staff did not explain the tip, but the source who was familiar with the problem confirmed that foreign government institutions and the US had asked Apple and Google for Metadata related to Push Guna notifications, for example, helped link the anonymous user of the message application with a particular Apple or Google account.

The source did not want to identify the foreign governance involved in the request, but described it as a democracy allied with the United States.

The source said they did not know how long the information had been collected that way.

Most users only think a little about push notifications, but sometimes it attracts the attention of technology because it is difficult to use these features without sending data to Google or Apple.

This year, French developer, David Libeau, said that users and developers often do not realize how their applications send data to the US technology giant through Push notifications, calling it "Privacy Nightmare."