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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: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 03 2016, @09:28PM
Interesting...I've been noticing the opposite, ad blockers don't seem to help much anymore. Noscript, privacy badger, adblock plus, and a browser with a builtin adblocker and I was *still* seeing ads all over the place. So I decided to get a bit scorched earth, and now my internet experience is positively beautiful :)
I got a pfsense hardware firewall (not really required, but it's nice...) then I grabbed some blocklists from iBlockList.com -- I think I'm using Level 1, Level 2, Microsoft, and ads. But even with that, occasionally something will get through, so I wrote a little shell script to generate my own list on top of those. Whenever I see anything I don't like -- ad, script, tracker, anything unnecessary -- I grab the domain and drop it in a list, then my script looks up that domain in a few dozen different nameservers, fetches the IP addresses, and adds all those addresses to the firewall. Which is far more than necessary for just ad blocking, as there's a domain-based blocklist too; but obviously that can only block outbound requests, and I run a few servers so I want to block these suckers on both sides. And the multiple nameservers are used to better take down companies with big CDNs, like Google. I'm sure I won't get ALL their systems, but it still makes me feel better... :)