Overview
- 404 Media reported Thursday that FBI agents read incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone by extracting them from the phone’s notification database during a Texas trial.
- The texts came from lock-screen previews saved by iOS, so only incoming messages were visible and the copies persisted even after the Signal app was deleted.
- The process did not defeat Signal’s end-to-end encryption, because the recovered data was created by iOS when it prepared and displayed alerts outside the app.
- Forensic recovery of these alerts typically requires physical access to the device and high‑end tools operated by trained examiners, which is common in law‑enforcement work.
- Users can reduce exposure by setting Signal notifications to “No Name or Content” and by hiding previews in iPhone settings, and experts warn the same risk exists for any app that shows message content in notifications as Apple and Signal declined comment.