Broadcast Notifications are messages broadcasted by the Portmaster Developers and Team to all Portmaster users. We use this to alert users of important updates, breaking feature changes, privacy related issues, among others.
All notifications are publicly added to the source file and then distributed to all Portmaster instances via our update system. Safing (the company behind Portmaster) learns nothing about the Portmaster instances themselves. No data is ever sent.
Rather, when your Portmaster downloads the newest broadcast notifications - alongside the filter list updates, for example - it checks if there are any broadcast notifications that were not shown yet and that match certain criteria. This way we can show notifications only to those who are affected by a situation and keep the noise low for all others. The matching is always done locally and the matching data is never sent anywhere.