Posted by 01-_- 13 hours ago
An individual can disable name or content in notifications in iOS, or set "mute messages" for a chat to prevent notifications from appearing for that specific chat, but there's nothing that gives group members any assurance that other group members are doing that.
Since the purposes of the program are pretty heavy on private communication, I'm inclined to think that takes precedence here, especially considering the consequences for dropping default message previews versus adding default reveal of supposedly private information.
The major hole here is that you turn off your notifications and don't have a bunch of database records, but the threat actor somehow finds out who your contacts are, gets a hold of their phone, and can then see all of the messages you sent via their notifications database. So if you want to trust the device for secure communications, you can't do that.
Personally, it's a moral good to free people from a concentration camp, even if it requires violence to do so. However it's also obvious that when you oppose a State, you get hit with terrorism charges. ...unless you're a jan6er, of course.
I've found other ways Signal can leak information, even with disappearing messages. It's not the total install-and-be-done privacy screen that some people think it is, and requires a little effort at the user end to fill in a few gaps.
Privacy, that’s Apple: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-apple-droppe...
Am I missing something here? Maybe I'm missing a subtle detail.
I'm always like "JFC, can't you cache the notifications, so I can see it there while waiting for the app to gets its act together?" But no, that's never an option.
So I'm getting a laugh out of how notifications last long enough to be extracted by someone just not the person that they're for. (Though to be fair, it could be a case of a notification that was never tapped, and therefore hadn't been purged yet. I couldn't tell from the story.)
Personally I'd be in favor of a hard app store policy, that if an app notifies you about something, all the importantdetails (like full message text) must be included - specifically to allow the user to view the important information without having to open the app itself.
I generally sympathize, I also don't like when apps block screenshots (or even more stupidly, they can block Android's amazing "select text from anywhere" feature...). But I don't think there are similar concerns for Signal allowing me to hide notification content from the OS.