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Comment by BelenusMordred | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't include motion sensors, I think there might be a few other recent additions also missing.

Of all the sites on Earth that I could learn this existed in the browser, it was rolling stone, with some generic static article on something I can't even remember.

Why exactly does a magazine need access to my gyroscope, magnetometer and acceleration sensors? Especially considering that I'm on a desktop that thankfully doesn't have such things.

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To see whether you're rolling?

My cynical guess is to help identify you to advertisers or something to sell to data brokers.

Unless the page has some feature that obviously uses accelerometer features, it’s 100% that, no cynicism necessary. This is a not-uncommon fingerprinting technique.

The magazine doesn't, but advertisers are interested in using this as yet another way of fingerprinting you: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~anupamd/paper/NDSS2016.pdf [PDF warning]

In order to experiment with WebXR without having my Oculus continously on my head, I installed the WebXR emulator extension from Mozilla.

I'm stunned how often I get the permission prompt on completely unrelated websites.

I guess it allows tracking scripts to do even more fingerprinting.

> I'm stunned how often I get the permission prompt on completely unrelated websites.

I have the same problem and found that the embedded Vimeo player assumes all videos could be played in VR, although the video is a normal, flat video, so any webpage embedding a Vimeo video, prompts that permission notification for me, although the actual video could be on a different page but still initialized on page load.

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