Posted on 08/04/2015 6:33:19 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
How your smartphone's battery life can be used to invade your privacy
A group of researchers have demonstrated how to track users with nothing more than their remaining battery power, which could compromise privacy
Alex Hern
Tuesday 4 August 2015 08.18 BST
A little-known feature of the HTML5 specification means that websites can find out how much battery power a visitor has left on their laptop or smartphone – and now, security researchers have warned that that information can be used to track browsers online.
The battery status API is currently supported in the Firefox, Opera and Chrome browsers, and was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, the organisation that oversees the development of the web’s standards) in 2012, with the aim of helping websites conserve users’ energy. Ideally, a website or web-app can notice when the visitor has little battery power left, and switch to a low-power mode by disabling extraneous features to eke out the most usage.
W3C’s specification explicitly frees sites from needing to ask user permission to discover they remaining battery life, arguing that “the information disclosed has minimal impact on privacy or fingerprinting, and therefore is exposed without permission grants”. But in a new paper from four French and Belgian security researchers, that assertion is questioned.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Privacy mode has no impact on how visible you are on the internet.
Privacy mode only prevents the data from your browsing session from being stored on your local machine.
Not windows. Your browser. Happens with any OS, even phone OSes.
It doesn’t provide identity theft, it provides tracking. Because the call returns your percentage of battery charge and the estimated time left of use in seconds that’s a fairly unique combination that can be used to follow you through hotspots. Add that to your cookies and web activity and they can know a fair bit about you.
curiouser and curiouser
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