Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:59PM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @10:59PM (#383392) Journal

    TFS outright states this is being used to track mobile devices by advertisers.

    Yet The linked standard says this is merely a proposed standard: "W3C Proposed Recommendation of March 2016", which is not incorporated in ANY BROWSER yet (Because most of the platforms don't have any mechanism to provide such data to the browser).

    Further, the non-standard, is being modified before it is even out of the proposal phase, to include privacy concerns.

    So once again, Hyped Bait Click Headlines that differ markedly from the truth.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Informative) by JNCF on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:32AM

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday August 03 2016, @12:32AM (#383421) Journal

    Yet The linked standard says this is merely a proposed standard: "W3C Proposed Recommendation of March 2016", which is not incorporated in ANY BROWSER yet (Because most of the platforms don't have any mechanism to provide such data to the browser).

    Can I Use disagrees, [caniuse.com] instead proposing that the battery API is supported in the Android browser, Chrome for Android, and the desktop versions Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. The earliest version of the standard I'm seeing [w3.org] is from April 2011. If you press Ctrl+Shift+i in Firefox or Chrome, it will bring up a console you can execute JavaScript in. Try pasting this snippet from the standard.

    // We get the initial value when the promise resolves ...
    navigator.getBattery().then(function(battery) {
        console.log(battery.level);
        // ... and any subsequent updates.
        battery.onlevelchange = function() {
            console.log(this.level);
        };
    });