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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @09:33PM (#383353)

    Or indeed any 3rd party spy beacons / malware infection hubs. One handy way to do so is using https://requestpolicycontinued.github.io/ [github.io]

    For the maximum effect, go for the custom by-yourself-for-yourself whitelist. You'll be amazed at the amount of crap the average web site comes with these days.