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.
(Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 02 2016, @07:24PM
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
But but ... Cool whitespace and zooming JPEG flash thingy shiny!!!!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:52PM
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
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.