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I guess enabling Lockdown mode might avoid this particular issue too, together with a bunch of other stuff?

Why would lockdown mode prevent this? I have lockdown mode on but that doesn't automatically make my notifications private.

Maybe it should.

It's a mode of the phone that is supposed to prevent cyber attacks, more so than "normal mode" I suppose, since it's supposed to limit features in the name of security. This seems like a variant of such attack, so seems like it should protect against it

There is a documented list of things that Lockdown Mode affects [1], this is not one of the advertised ones. There are a bunch of other (undocumented) things it affects (some of which are bugs :/), but I don't believe it has any affect on notification storage.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120

Mostly it seems the documentation is vague. Is there anything clearer than this?

> Web browsing: Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.

Lockdown mode would prevent access to the data in theory.

But most likely (pure speculation mind you), this was a case of someone handing over the phone for review and where cooperating.

It might have been that they deleted signal some time ago, or even deleted signal and then handed over the phone.

It's notable that the data wasn't recovered from signals storage (was the data securely erased or that kind of recovery not attempted?).

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