From Vice: Apple Just Confirmed Governments Are Spying on People’s Phones With Push Notifications:

The process by which push notifications are generated requires the phone company to serve as a “digital post office,” Wyden wrote. Push notifications are sent through Apple and Google’s servers, which means that the companies “serve as intermediaries in the transmission process,” and can therefore be made to hand over information to governments that request it.

According to Wyden’s letter, the information that can be gleaned from push notification requests is mostly metadata. This includes information “detailing which app received a notification and when, as well as the phone and associated Apple or Google account to which that notification was intended to be delivered,” Wyden wrote. In some cases, requesters may even receive unencrypted content such as the text that was delivered in the notification.

The senator said that companies can therefore “be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information.”

It would be so dope if we jumped on stories like this with the same tenacity and vigor as when an iMessage blue bubble story breaks.

Telecom companies are the most user-hostile in the biz.