• Jako302@feddit.org
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    23 hours ago

    That depends on your definition of private.

    A push notification is pretty much just a ping that wakes up the app that is supposed to show you the notification. There usually isnt much data in that ping, so the only thing the Google firebase servers (or whatever other backend solution you use) see is a timestamp and an app. If you then disable Notification historie (default is off bzw on GraphenOS) there is no other data stored anywhere.

    That’s metadata that every single chat service has, no matter if its E2EE or not, because that’s the bare minimum they need to transmit anything at all. If that already isn’t private for you then you’d have to stop using the internet or phonecalls entirely and go back to carrier pidgeons.

    • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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      3 hours ago

      It depends on the app. Some apps do (or can be configured to) indeed send “empty”/blank notifications which just notify you that you’ve received a new message from an app, but not from whom, or what the message contains.

      However most apps by default will contain more data, such as who the message is from, and some/all of the sent message body.

      • VibeSurgeon@piefed.social
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        3 hours ago

        If you get a push notification on your phone, everything you see in that notification must by definition pass through the push notification service.

        This is immediately disprovable by anyone who has ever implemented push notifications on Android

      • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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        6 hours ago

        You seem to be under an impression that the actual notification that you see in the notification shade of your phone must go through FCM. That is not true. There are no external services involved in generating notifications on Android, apps can just show notifications by themselves.

        What FCM is used for is sending a wakeup call to an app. The naming is confusing, but the “notification service” is not sending a notification in the sense of what you see in the notification shade. It is notifying an app of an event. The app can then react in any way it wants, possibly by creating a notification for the notification shade. But the notification you see in the UI of your phone didn’t go through FCM.

        Some apps do (or can be configured to) indeed send “empty”/blank notifications which just notify you that you’ve received a new message from an app, but not from whom, or what the message contains.

        And this is a completely separate thing. Yes, you can configure apps to not show details in notifications, but that has nothing to do with FCM. It only controls what the app does locally, when generating the local notification, after FCM is no longer involved (if it was involved in the first place - many notifications don’t need it, for example a notification from a timer app).

        If you get a push notification on your phone, everything you see in that notification must by definition pass through the push notification service.

        This statement is easy to disprove in another way too. FCM only supports sending up to 4KB of data, and yet you can get a notification with high resolution images. Which also shows that no, things you see in the notification didn’t have to pass through the push notification service - the local app got the data and prepared the notification by itself, possibly after being woken up to do so by FCM.