U.S. Government Uses Push Notifications to Spy on People, Senator Reveals

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent a letter on Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland revealing that the U.S. government has used push notification records to investigate criminal suspects, according to The Washington Post. Wyden said his team had received intel on the U.S. and other countries requesting the data associated with notifications from Google and Apple, but the Justice Department had banned the companies from disclosing any details about the process. The senator pushed for a repeal of that policy, writing, “Apple and Google should be permitted to be transparent about the legal demands they receive, particularly from foreign governments.” Metadata from push notifications can contain details about who a user is talking to and even the contents of a message. Apple issued a Wednesday statement to Reuters, saying, “Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests,” while Google showed in its latest transparency report that it had been asked 192,000 times for data from more than 400,000 accounts from July to December 2022.