While Wyden’s letter says that governments exterior the US have requested folks’s push notification data, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has accomplished in order nicely. A February 2021 search warrant application submitted by an FBI agent to the US District Court in Washington, DC, requested particulars for 2 accounts managed by Meta (then Facebook), particularly citing a request for push notification tokens. The search warrant request associated to an investigation into an individual accused of participating within the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol.

Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, didn’t instantly reply to WIRED’s request to remark. The DOJ has not but responded to a request for remark. A spokesperson for Signal, the favored encrypted messaging app, additionally didn’t reply.

Although Wyden is asking the DOJ to permit Apple and Google to debate authorities requests for push notification data, the senator’s letter seems to have enabled them to do exactly that.

An Apple spokesperson tells WIRED that the corporate has up to date its Law Enforcement Guidelines in its transparency report back to replicate authorities requests for push notification data. The firm may also start to element these requests in its subsequent transparency report.

“Apple is committed to transparency and we have long been a supporter of efforts to ensure that providers are able to disclose as much information as possible to their users,” Apple says in a press release. “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information and now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”

Google confirmed to WIRED that it receives requests for push notification data, however the firm says it already consists of a lot of these requests in its transparency reports.

“We were the first major company to publish a public transparency report sharing the number and types of government requests for user data we receive, including the requests referred to by Senator Wyden,” a Google spokesperson tells WIRED. “We share the senator’s commitment to keeping users informed about these requests.”

A WIRED evaluation of Google’s most up-to-date transparency report for the interval between December 2019 and December 2022 discovered that it doesn’t particularly escape authorities requests for push notification data, and Google confirmed that it aggregates this knowledge in its transparency report.

Google’s transparency report exhibits that the US authorities requested Google Cloud Platform knowledge from enterprise prospects 175 instances through the interval, and of these, used a search warrant 13 instances. It is unclear whether or not any of these requests for person knowledge included push notification data—particulars which will, following Wyden’s letter, be revealed sooner or later.

Additional reporting by William Turton and Dhruv Mehrotra.