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HTML5: Access Battery status through javascript

smartjava.org

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Re: HTML5: Access Battery status through javascript

#11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article "And it doesn't work yet on Mac (does work on iOS, Android and windows)."

Didn't work for me on Android 4.0.3 in either Chrome or the Android browser

I suspect it might only be in the Firefox beta stream? (In which case, I'm surprised to see the OP mention iOS).

Re: HTML5: Access Battery status through javascript

#12
post #9
post #7

I haven't tested it, but the post claims that this works on iOS, and I've never seen a preference option to disable this. Someone clever could use this misfeature (what amounts to a data leak) to perform a sort of traffic analysis attack and infer data about your sleeping/working/browsing schedule, and then potentially interpolate travel patterns, business associations, and maybe even correlate to a precise (historic…

Why would a user leave the web page open through their sleeping working browsing schedule? Why would a dev use battery status to interpolate travel patterns instead of, say, the location API or your geo IP? Given the other things available to a dev wanting to know about a user's behavior, battery status is a strange one to rant about. > The security implications are vast. No they're not. Battery status has been avail…

The problem with web apps though is that they aren't really local to your computer. We have all kinds of sandboxes to prevent, say, a web page from opening up a connection to talk to your PCI cards.

I wouldn't say that this is the same as giving battery status to every app on your laptop. A closer example might be smart phones. But there's a presumption that if software is running on your laptop or smartphone you have at least some idea of what it is and what it can do. In practice not so much and such apps could misuse this data along with others.

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