• bearboiblake@pawb.social
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    22 hours ago

    If you don’t use Google Play Services, you don’t get push notifications, so yes. Libre reimplementations of Google Play Services such as Gapps etc. or alternative push notification providers do not circumvent this issue, except possibly self-hosted push notification providers. This approach is really rare though and limited generally to very few apps.

    • Redjard@reddthat.com
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      15 hours ago

      This is about a history of notifications locally on the phone.
      This is implemented outside of gms at least on my rom, and in the past I have also installed a separate app to do the same.
      If you log your notifications … that log can leak your notifications.

      • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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        15 hours ago

        Yes, I know! Sorry for the confusion, I just wanted to take the opportunity to raise awareness about a privacy issue that lots of people aren’t aware of

    • frongt@lemmy.zip
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      14 hours ago

      If I turn off notifications on my end, does the other person still generate a push notification when they send me a message, even if I never receive it?

      • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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        13 hours ago

        Edit: Sorry, I think I misunderstood your question. If you don’t have Google Play Services enabled but your friend does and messages you, no, a push notification won’t be sent, but if you message them, one will be sent to them.

        I thought you were asking if you just disabled notifications on your phone if that would prevent push notifications from being sent. I’ll leave my original answer in case someone else has that question.


        It depends on what exactly you mean, but usually not. If you mean in your phone’s notifications management settings, that does not affect the push notifications being sent to Google/Apple servers, that’s just a local setting to decide how your phone handles it.

        Some apps, though rarely, allow you to disable push notifications from being sent. If it exists, this is inside a settings screen in the app itself or on the app provider’s website somewhere. Generally, only privacy-conscious apps provide such settings.

          • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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            13 hours ago

            To send you a push notification, an app requires a special token specific to that app and your device, kinda like an API key, which can only be generated for a device using Google Play Services. Without that token, a push notification cannot be sent. These tokens expire, so if you used Google Play Services and just turned it off, push notifications will still get sent into the ether - but never delivered - until the token expires, at which point notifications can’t be sent anymore. Badly developed apps might still try to send push notifications with expired tokens, I have no idea what Google servers would do with that, but I’d guess they would just discard it immediately.

    • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Is this true if you don’t have Google Play Services but the person you’re messaging does? Is one person cutting GPS out enough?

      • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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        22 hours ago

        The message you send them would probably go through as a push notification to them, but the message they send you wouldn’t.