Push notifications make the world go round. When handled judiciously, these alerts interrupt users with only the information they deem most essential.

Most users want notifications of incoming text messages and phone calls. Lots want pings from incoming chat messages. Some want to know about new email. Others want sports, political, and entertainment news to get their attention.

Most Public Push Notification Services Come From Apple or Google

Regardless of one’s feelings about gargantuan American companies, for the sake of this blog post, let’s regard Google and Apple as good actors with noble intentions. This December 6, 2023 Washington Post article exposes the United States Federal government’s use of Google and Apple services to track individuals’ push notifications.

When a user enables push notifications on an application, Apple and Google create a token. Tokens contain a small piece of data linking a user’s device to the account information they’ve given the companies, like name, email address, and possibly additional personal information.

The tokens hold details about who a person is communicating with, when they talk or chat and, in some cases, the text of the notification message.

Google and Apple hand over their notification data, sometimes without informing the affected users, when issued a court order, search warrant, or subpoena.

Isn’t This a Good Way to Catch the Bad Guys?

Digital footprints are key to stopping sex offenders, traffickers, terrorists, and other varieties of bad guys. In this sense, Google and Apple are improving societal safety by complying with federal orders. On the other hand, the power to share private information with government sources is cause for concern.

Anyone who’s watched Jason Bourne movies knows that government representatives aren’t always on the up and up.

The privacy collateral damage

In its most recent transparency report, Google reported that in the second half of 2023, it received 192,000 requests for data related to more than 400,000 accounts around the world. Approximately 70,000 of the requests came from the United States.

This volume of official information requests coupled with Google’s and Apple’s lack of transparency invariably results in inadvertent privacy violations of innocent users.

How the TrustCall Dome provides security without compromises

TrustCall iOS and Android users may easily connect to a secure ‘Dome’ environment that’s entirely invisible to the public web. The TrustCall infrastructure is self-contained. None of the TrustCall Dome services use the public web, including its notification services.

In a crowded field of secure communication platforms, KoolSpan TrustCall stands alone. TrustCall competitors may offer end-to-end encryption, but they also punch holes in their firewalls, allowing Google’s and Apple’s public push notifications to poke through.

Any breach of a firewall, whether intentional or not, presents a vulnerability vector. Governments and enterprises relying on TrustCall cannot allow unauthorized notification tracking, even if it’s an innocent mistake. By providing its own web-independent services, the TrustCall Dome sits beneath an unyielding firewall, providing security without compromises.

Users connected to the TrustCall Dome may exchange end-to-end encrypted chat messages, group messages, and attachments, hold voice or video calls, or conduct conference calls without any exposure to the public Web.

David Asch