Comment by pcmaffey
5 years ago
What if battery status was used to triage tasks? Wait to do something intensive if you’re low, etc. Seems like a respectful enhancement.
If theses APIs are only accessible with user consent, I don’t see the problem.
5 years ago
What if battery status was used to triage tasks? Wait to do something intensive if you’re low, etc. Seems like a respectful enhancement.
If theses APIs are only accessible with user consent, I don’t see the problem.
It's not easy. Mozilla ran into the privacy implications of the battery status API a couple of years ago: It was so precise that it allows the mentioned fingerprinting: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/11/firefox_remov...
Every additional API added to the browser makes the risk of such side effects greater.
> It was so precise
Then make it less so. Browser APIs can - and do - lie to their users. For example, if you try to query the color of a visited link, you won't get the actual color, but instead you get the default link color. This is to prevent an old bug that let you basically harvest a user's browsing history.