Comment by remus
14 hours ago
It's a UX trade off. For non-adversarial websites it's very convenient for users because things just work without having to go through loads of permissions pop ups for every website, but of course this then makes this info a juicy target if you're trying to fingerprint someone.
It's not a tradeoff, it's poor design.
But it is a design trade-off. The opposite case can be seem in the many websites asking to send you notifications, and the many flavours of cookie notices. When you have to ask the user permission to do anything and everything, the user gets annoyed and desensitized. They start allowing everything (my always collects dozens of notification-enabled websites if given the chance), and the point of asking for permission is lost.
> It's not a tradeoff, it's poor design.
How so? There seems a fairly inherent tension between having things just work by default and hiding surface area for fingerprinting behind permissions pop ups. For example say you go to a maps website, how do you decide whether to share the users location with the website? Or enable webGL functionality to render some fancy layout on the screen? As a user having to enable all that stuff per-website is annoying.
Maybe there's some other way Im missing?