Can Microsoft see all Windows notifications?

Questions
1

I have read Apple reveals 'push notification spying' by foreign governments and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.10589 and the forum thread about it here at PG , Is there a way to check if notifications from bank apps are e2ee or sent in plaintext ? I know metadata will be leaked in all cases and that’s unavoidable unfortunately

and I’m also curious about Windows , for example i have Signal Desktop installed , do all notifications go through Microsoft servers ? what about other apps ?

On android this can be mitigated with unified push (if the app supports it) , is there any similar solution for other OSes ?

2

Dynamic analysis, place Windows in a VM, use network monitoring tools, and see what leaks out.

3

If applications use WNS (a lot do I believe), then yes:

For local notifications (“created on your machine”), I don’t think so, however this is just speculation. They are however stored in a local SQLite database (wpndatabase.db) in this folder: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Notifications\.

If you have OneDrive configured to sync AppData (not sure if this is even possible) or Phone Link (or any other Cross-Device sync) enabled they might be stored on Microsoft servers.

4

I don’t have Onedrive at all

chatgpt (through duck.ai) says : " Signal Desktop’s notifications on Windows come from the Signal app itself via standard OS notification support (not WNS).

Within Windows, it uses the Windows notification system (the toast notification APIs) and then Signal controls whether banners/sounds appear based on its own settings and whether the app/window is considered focused." , i wonder if windows servers can see the metadata like with Apple and Google , and is there a way to know if a windows app uses WNS or not ?

5

I do not represent PG but LLM generated content is forbidden on this forum.

6

Probably, but it’s cumbersome.

However, when browsing through event viewer, I noticed there is a policy in gpedit.msc to disable WNS (do so at your own risk) under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar > Notifications > Turn off notification network usage:

This policy setting blocks applications from using the network to send notifications to update tiles, tile badges, toast, or raw notifications. This policy setting turns off the connection between Windows and the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS). This policy setting also stops applications from being able to poll application services to update tiles.

If you enable this policy setting, applications and system features will not be able receive notifications from the network from WNS or via notification polling APIs.