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

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.


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  • (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!!!!

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:52PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> 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.