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Battery Status Being Used to Track Your Mobile Browsing

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the big-bro-is-getting-smarter dept.

Dogeball writes:

This standard is being used by ads to track your mobile browsing habits across sites, connections and VPNs.

From the article:

Intended to allow site owners to serve low-power versions of sites and web apps to users with little battery capacity left, soon after it was introduced, privacy researchers pointed out that it could also be used to spy on users. The combination of battery life as a percentage and battery life in seconds provides offers 14m combinations, providing a pseudo-unique identifier for each device.

The standard suggests that false data can be provided by the client to hide the true battery status for testing purposes. It seems to me that there should be a privacy setting to randomize battery status, which privacy mode in browsers should enable by default.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:02PM (#383258)

    They do not need an API for this. If the device wants a low-power edition of a web-page, then let the browser choose to signal that it is in "low battery mode" via an http-header. Nobody legitimately needs to know the actual battery levels.

    FYI, random agent spoofer [mozilla.org] has an option to disable this API and a bunch of other ones like webgl, gamepad api, dom performance timing, etc.

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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:24PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:24PM (#383269) Journal

    I've got an even better idea: Write web sites that don't waste power no matter what the battery status is.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:31PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:31PM (#383273)

      But but ... Cool whitespace and zooming JPEG flash thingy shiny!!!!

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:52PM

        by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:52PM (#383577) Homepage
        Deep down, what you really mean is <blink> and <marquee>.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:58AM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:58AM (#383982) Journal

          Yeah, it's a shame that Mozilla no longer supports <blink> so now it has to be emulated with expensive JavaScript. ;-)

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @05:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 03 2016, @05:56AM (#383506)

    So hard to keep up... this is just a list of 40ish features to enable/disable, reading through all those standards... I have mouths to feed.

    I wish RAS defaulted to most secure. :(