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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Surely the battery level isn't particularly useful for fingerprinting, since it's going to change fairly quickly?

But why the fuck should a website know how much charge my phone has?

It's quite clever, that a site that uses lots of processing, or has autoplay, can limit what it does: " your battery is low, do you want to continue ".

The problem is that shitheads exploit every possibility to reduce the utility of society in favour of their own profit.

This is why we can't have nice things; as the aphorism goes.

Well that is the problem with it, every shitty features like that someone can come up with something "quite clever" to do with it, in reality, all these things are being used 99% of the time for tracking.

Maybe programmers and designers should start thinking the other way around: what could be pretty clever that could be used for a feature but that CANNOT be misused for tracking

We are living in the best of all possible worlds. Without shitheads we would be vulnerable and wouldn't even know it.

> It's quite clever, that a site that uses lots of processing, or has autoplay, can limit what it does: " your battery is low, do you want to continue ".

That sounds like a client concern, not a server concern.

I mean, as a consumer of web content I do not want my power saving profile to be accessible or actively influenced by a third party.

To stop computationally intensive or security related or otherwise sensitive operations when charge level is low? Save the state / synchronize more often when charge level is low to prevent data loss?

Running untrusted code doing these things is not something I'm ok with.

Many places will increase prices with low battery as a despiration tactic. Its shady af and should be illegal imho.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208880

I read the article you linked to, but the method it describes would surely only work for a few minutes, or until the battery level goes down?

Having said that, I do get that battery level has some potential as part of a very short-lived fingerprint, and I really don't see the need to expose this information to remote sites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com