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Signal messages retrieved from iOS notification, as seen in Prairieland federal trial (europe.pub)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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TLDR: signal content in Apple notification can be retrieved even after signal app deletion.

I saw from this reddit thread: Signal messages retrieved from iPhone after uninstalling app. : signal

Referencing this news article: Pretti Killing May Affect ICE Prairieland "Antifa Cell" Terrorism Trial

The mention of signal is in court documents here: March 10: Federal Trial Day 12 - Support the Prairieland Defendants

Signal chat evidence from Sharp’s device (Exhibit 158):
Messages were recovered from Sharp’s phone through Apple’s internal notification storage — Signal had been removed, but incoming notifications were preserved in internal memory. Only incoming messages were captured (no outgoing).

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[–] 10 points 6 months ago (8 children)

Well, of course. All notification contents go through Apple's servers (or Google's in case of Android).

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  • [–] 20 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Not all, no. There are alternatives on Android:

    The good news is that alternative methods for push notifications are available, namely SSE (Server Sent Events) and WebSockets.

    Additionally, a new open source project, UnifiedPush is becoming increasingly popular. UnifiedPush is an open source, private alternative to Google for notifications.

    https://tuta.com/blog/google-push-alternative#alternatives-to-google-push

    Signal for android uses web sockets for notifications

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    It's not because of push notifications. the message is not sent to firebase, just a signal that the app should do a refresh.

    It's because the system saves the notifications apps posted to the notification menu.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (1 child)

    As I already replied om one of your other comments:

    It’s not because of push notifications. the message is not sent to firebase, just a signal that the app should do a refresh.

    Is is 100% because of firebase. Here is an example payload from firebases official document:

    {
  "message":{
    "token":"bk3RNwTe3H0:CI2k_HHwgIpoDKCIZvvDMExUdFQ3P1...",
    "notification":{
      "title":"Portugal vs. Denmark",
      "body":"great match!"
    }
  }
}

    https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/customize-messages/set-message-type

    Notification history is purely local to the device. It is not sent to any servers.

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