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FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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What's the purpose of keeping a history of seen notifications in a database? That shit should be being automatically purged if it needs to exist to show it, after its been dismissed.
I wonder if this revelation will trigger a change in how it works, since apple has often tried to do things securely?
If you accidentally dismiss a notification, you can go back in the history to see it. Or if you dismiss a message notification that you want to respond to later. Or if a notification keeps popping up and disappearing and you want to investigate.
I just checked if there were any controls for this on Android. As far as I could tell, you can only toggle it on/off.
Off clears the history, but I wish we could do more than all or nothing. I don't need a history of more than a week at most.
I just checked and it seems to be off by default in e OS, another W
I have it turned on. It only shows the last 24 hours.
Oh I honestly didnt understand there's a perpetual database you can go back and look at, I didnt even know i had one on android, I just turned that off.
I understood it as they need a database to hold the notifications you should be shown and it gets purged eventually kinda thing.
As a history it makes sense, and that its something that can leak.
Also if you leave it on, uninstalling an app should definitely purge its history.
TIL I have a "notification history" toggle setting
The poor FBI has kinda triggered a Streisand effect. We used this thing no one knows about to win a case and shit now they know about it and are turning it off!
My android shows a history of notifications. Not sure what the retention period is. It does add conveniece by allowing me to check dismissed notifications. It allows some monitoring about the type, content, and frequency of notifications as well as control to block them.
It certainly now appears the convenience isn't worth the loss of privacy, though.
Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn't actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it's difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go
But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go
Ive had that issue as well, deeplinks can be fickle creatures if the app isnt perfectly set up and youre potentially in a spot it fails in.
Did you read the headline?
Control.
Apple has gone out of their way to fuck with the government trying to get data from people phones, I really don't think this was something done on purpose to help them.
The data has to be stored somewhere to be shown, so a temporary spot existing isn't a surprise. It almost sounds more like lazy developers not thinking the government could access the history that only gets purged after X amount of time, instead of continually being pruned.
Remember when the fbi wanted access to a perp’s iPhone and they told the govt to fuck off?
No way, it's for the data collection.
They dont want to share it, that's right, but it's very much not done by accident.