It’s supposed to be outside the scale, like a fuel gauge before you start the car. Which I agree is not great, but I can see what they were going for.

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.

Eh, depending how old you are. I can believe somebody is going to Mars in ~50 years.

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.

Equating photo backup, something that needs to be turned on and only uploads media you create, from folders you choose, to North Korean government taking a hidden screenshot of your screen every 5 seconds, is a gigantic stretch.

Definitely don’t use Google Photos, Google can’t be trusted with your photos. But wow these are completely different things.

What I’m seeing, is that:

• it doesn’t log all your touches, but some actions in some apps
• not on any Android device, but some device categories like smartphones
• only on those with Google services (no China devices for example)
• only with a Google account logged in
• only when that account has that feature turned on

That’s already very far from every Android device, let alone every touch.

Yeah, good stuff to tell people about!

But “Google is tracking your every touch on any Android device” is very different from “Google saves a history of your Google searches, and some major actions in some Google apps”.

I absolutely agree with you. What I’m arguing against is baseless FUD without any specifics, any sources, any details, and making extraodinary claims without extraordinary evidence. I didn’t mean that the type of tracking is ridiculous, what I’m saying is ridiculous is the claim that Google is collecting the logs of EVERY touch on EVERY Android device. Does that claim even needs to be disproven?

• Is that happening on Chinese Android phones without any Google services?
• Is that happening on AOSP phones without Google services?
• Is that happening on GrapheneOS, on other custom ROMs?
• Is that happening on my washing machine that for some reason runs Android?
• Is that baked into the system? From which Android version? In a particular system app? Where can I see these logs of all touches for myself?

It is patently obvious it cannot be happening on EVERY Android device. And I’d welcome evidence that it’s happening on even a SINGLE one. But I don’t see it. Because it’s made up hyperbole that’s poisoning the discussion of real tracking.

Because your touches are tracked. But not system-wide, but in individual apps, by the individual developers, most of whom don’t share the data with Google, only if you use these apps, and each developer can only track what’s happening in their own app. Which is worth talking about, but it’s hard when people are just making stuff up.

Yes, I’m sure he’s angry people are diluting the invigilation he exposed by coming up with fake ones all the time, and making people think it’s not worth fighting it anymore.

Do you have something constructive to say? Did you read an interesting article about a new type of tracking by a security researcher? Maybe you ran your own network capture and found something previously unknown? Great, let’s share that and learn how to block it.

Do you just wave your hands around and say that Google knows everything about you at all times using all Android devices, through unspecified means based on your gut feeling? Then that’s not constructive and is just spreading helplessness.

Oh Google logs and collect all taps on the screen? I’d love to know through which system service that happens, how the data leaves the device, to which servers is it going, which devices are affected by this, and how we can disable it. Oh you made it up and actually there are no details? Right.

Yes, Google’s code processes every touch, they wrote Android after all, so you are technically correct.

Is it all being sent somewhere from every Android device? Of course not, that’s ridiculous. Individual apps might have various levels of usage analytics though.

That’s reasonable I think, if people are messing with infrastructure, it’s good it’s being verified they are doing legitimate work. Though don’t call them on a hunch terrorists obviously…

Thanks for making me realise why I never had the legendary “Windows broke dual boot” issues that everyone says are so common. I always used separate drives!

I think you are confused on what cis means

The entire thing is for running Linux software on Windows, it’s the complete opposite of Wine.

Grub did not detect your VM, it detected a bootable operating system on the drive because you passed it through to your VM

Yeah, the bootable drive that contained my VM install, that’s what I’m saying.

But i prefer using a raw disk file image

I started that way, but I had a disk with a single partition that contained a single file - the raw disk image file, and eventually decided this is silly, the filesystem on that disk is useless.

I did that, and since I got a dedicated SSD drive for it, I used it for the VM as a block device. Later after a GRUB update I discovered Windows in my GRUB boot menu. Turns out GRUB detected my VM, and now I can physically boot into my VM. Which I didn’t even know was possible.

So yeah, I accidentally dual boot Windows without meaning to, even though it’s a VM. Except when I boot into it, then it’s not, apparently.

I was going to post, but my card only had one number on the back, 3 digits long. :(