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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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That depends on your definition of private.
A push notification is pretty much just a ping that wakes up the app that is supposed to show you the notification. There usually isnt much data in that ping, so the only thing the Google firebase servers (or whatever other backend solution you use) see is a timestamp and an app. If you then disable Notification historie (default is off bzw on GraphenOS) there is no other data stored anywhere.
That's metadata that every single chat service has, no matter if its E2EE or not, because that's the bare minimum they need to transmit anything at all. If that already isn't private for you then you'd have to stop using the internet or phonecalls entirely and go back to carrier pidgeons.
It depends on the app. Some apps do (or can be configured to) indeed send "empty"/blank notifications which just notify you that you've received a new message from an app, but not from whom, or what the message contains.
However most apps by default will contain more data, such as who the message is from, and some/all of the sent message body.
If you get a push notification on your phone, everything you see in that notification must by definition pass through the push notification service.