‘Unidentified governments spying on Apple and Google users with push notifications’

A US senator has been investigating a tip that foreign governments are demanding push notification records from Apple and Google (Picture: Getty Images)

Unidentified foreign governments are spying on Apple and Google smartphone users through push notifications, a US lawmaker warned.

Senator Ron Wyden in a letter to the Department of Justice on Wednesday said he received a tip that foreign governments were demanding push notification records from Apple and Google and that his office has been investigating the matter for the past year.

‘In response to that query, the companies told my staff that information about this practice is restricted from public release by the government,’ wrote Wyden.

Wyden explained that apps send push notifications through services by Apple and Google, which are intermediaries in the transmission process.

Push notifications to smartphones go through services by Apple and Google (Picture: Reuters)

‘As with all of the other information these companies store for or about their users, because Apple and Google deliver push notification data, they can be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information,’ Wyden wrote.

The senator said the tech giants should ‘be transparent about the legal demands they receive, particularly from foreign governments, just as the companies regularly notify users about other types of government demands for data’.

He called on the Justice Department to repeal or modify any policies preventing them from being transparent.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Metro.co.uk.

Apple stated that Wyden’s letter allows them to disclose more on how push notifications were monitored by governments.

‘In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information,’ stated Apple. ‘Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.’

Meanwhile, Google said it shared the senator’s ‘commitment to keeping users informed about these requests’.

The letter comes more than a year after Google revealed that Android users were targeted by ‘Predator’ spyware linked to government-backed hackers in several foreign countries. Researchers from Google’s Threat Analysis Group said the government-backed actors buying the exploits were likely operating in Armenia, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Madagascar, Serbia and Spain.

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