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Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

Push notifications definitely would benefit from more granular controls. Tagging alerts like discount notifications you didn't set up as something separate for instance. I don't trust some AI classification over an explicit API.

Steve Jobs once said that privacy is knowing what you sign up for. Feels like push notifications deserve the same treatment.

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This is built into Android. A program like Discord has very granular controls over each type (DM, server event, stage event, etc) of notification as well as controls for each source (You can set a specific users DMs to be priority messages, silenced, show/hide from lock screen, etc).

A program like Uber Eats has a bit less benefit to allowing such controls over what they send you. While they do still break down messages by type, their descriptions are a bit cryptic and after getting an unsolicited notification from it, I ended up disabling all of them.

One that was annoying me for a while is Turo (like AirBnB for rental cars), which had only one notification category. When I have a rental upcoming or active, I need to be notified about messages from the host, but it would also send marketing notifications on occasion, which I never want to see. I would turn off notifications manually most of the time.

It looks like they recently split it into "marketing" and "transactional", which is probably good enough.

The one AI thing I'd like my phone to do is reliably decide when I would like to be told about any given notification using an on-device model.

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