Controversies regarding Apple’s use of data continue to be the order of the day after the company admitted that the US government has been secretly tracking the activity of the applications used by its smartphones, as revealed by the US Democratic senator. Ron Wyden.
“Apple and Google are in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users use certain apps,” Wyden detailed in his letter in which he demands that the Department of Justice update or repeal policies that prohibit companies from informing the public about these covert government requests.
Specifically, Wyden says the government has received information about so-called push notifications, which are used to provide a wide variety of alerts to app users through a beep or a text alert on the home screen notifying users. users of new messages, emails, comments on social networks, etc.
The characteristic of this type of notices is that “they are not sent directly from the application provider to the users’ smartphones”, but rather “they go through a kind of digital post office managed by the provider of the phone’s operating system ”.
The information that the government has been receiving can be “which application received a notification and when, as well as the phone and the associated Apple or Google account” or even “the actual text that is shown to a user in an application notification ”.
The senator has ruled that “these companies should be authorized to disclose whether they have been forced to facilitate this surveillance practice, to publish global statistics on the number of requests they receive and, unless temporarily muzzled by a court, to notify specific clients requests for their data.