Push-to-Sync. We observed 8 apps employ a push-to-sync strat- egy to prevent privacy leakage to Google via FCM. In this mitigation strategy, apps send an empty (or almost empty) push notification to FCM. Some apps, such as Signal, send a push notification with no data (aside from the fields that Google sets; see Figure 4). Other apps may send an identifier (including, in some cases, a phone num- ber). This push notification tells the app to query the app server for data, the data is retrieved securely by the app, and then a push notification is populated on the client side with the unencrypted data. In these cases, the only metadata that FCM receives is that the user received some message or messages, and when that push noti- fication was issued. Achieving this requires sending an additional network request to the app server to fetch the data and keeping track of identifiers used to correlate the push notification received on the user device with the message on the app server.

Nothing changed, but many people struggle to understand their our own degree of relative ignorance and overvalue high-level details that are leaky abstractions which make the consequentially dissimilar look superficially similar.