Yes, I assume so.

Yes it’s called metadata. I don’t know why they want it.

I don’t know, are they? As far as we know they could only get unsent notifications, which are obviously still with Apple/Google because the target phone is offline and so they couldn’t be delivered yet. Which would explain why they only got thousands of them, not billions.

You are trying to read what isn’t there. Push notifications just don’t contain any messages, at all, in any form, whether you want to call it data or metadata. They are just telling the Signal app to wake up, and then it securely checks with the server what’s up.

The only think authorities are getting then, is the fact your Signal app was told to wake up at time X. Not whether you actually received a message, let alone any information about any messages.

It is confusing the system is called “push notifications”, because it has nothing to do with the actual notifications you are seeing on your phone. It’s just a mechanism to wake up sleeping apps so that they can check up with their server.

A push notification, from a technical standpoint, is just a way to wake up an app. It doesn’t have to contain any information.

So when you get a message, the messaging service sends a push notification through Apple/Google, which is a way of saying “Hey messaging app, wake up”. The app then starts running in the background on your phone, connects to it’s server, asks if there is anything new to know about, and the server tells it about a new message, if any. This can then generate a notification on your phone, but importantly what you are seeing in the notification did not come through Apple/Google, all that did was the “Hey messaging app, wake up!”.

If authorities then request this data from Apple/Google, all they can see is the times at which your messaging app was asked to wake up. Not whether any message was actually received, or what it contained, or from who. Because all that never touched Apple/Google’s systems, not even in an encrypted form.

That being said, some data can be sent directly through the Apple/Google system along with the wake up message, so it’s not impossible that some apps include some metadata there. In theory they shouldn’t. For example simple marketing notifications or ads often are just included with the push, because it’s simple to do.

Yeah, and all I said is you can do tracking without them, as you confirmed, so I don’t know what you are disagreeing with.

No

Yes, you can do tracking without displaying any buttons, I don’t know what to tell you.

Yeah, but you can do the same tracking without actually displaying any buttons, so the point stands.

I thought it’s going to link to Tesseract

Your answer to “how to harden SSH?” is “harden SSH”?

I know your two other points gave concrete suggestions, but it’s pretty funny you suggested to “harden sshd” when that is what OP is asking how to do.