Earlier this month, 404 Media broke a fascinating, complex, and concerning story: The FBI had successfully retrieved incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, despite the fact that those messages were set to self-destruct within the famously secure chat app. Though it’s easy to assume Signal would be to blame, it turns out the fault was with iOS—and Apple may have just fixed the problem.
To recap: 404 Media spoke to someone who attended the trial in question, where the court learned that all iPhone notifications are stored in a database on the device. So even though the Signal messages were deleted, their notification data remained in this database, from where the FBI was able to obtain them. (The defendant’s own messages weren’t present, since only incoming texts would generate notifications.)
The story generated buzz across the tech community. Many of us who have used iPhones since their inception 20 years ago
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