As long as you're asked for permission I don't see the problem
1. Most people aren't engineers and don't understand the privacy implications of this, and these types of metadata collections. Browsers aren't just developer tools, they are made for the general public.
2. I already get spammed by too many permission popups; rarely are they for purposes that benefit the user. It would be interested to see some stats on how many users simply accept these popups to dismiss them without regard for the consequences.
Unless the feature is designed to fake data and make permission status opaque to the remote, it's a privacy reduction that will happen, the only question is when.
Both of which you could argue 'allow for surveillance'
What user-oriented use-cases does this enable which couldn’t have been done otherwise?
I really thinks this is apples vs oranges.
In this case:
> Making these distinctions is important for applications which have the option of delivering notifications across multiple devices, such as a desktop and smartphone. Users may find it frustrating when notifications are delivered to the wrong device or are disruptive. For example, if they switch from a tab containing a messaging application to one for a document they are editing, the messaging application, not being able to observe that the user is still interacting with their device, may assume that they have left to grab a coffee and start delivering notifications to their phone, causing it to buzz distractingly, instead of displaying notifications on their desktop or incrementing a badge count.
Is any webapp doing this? To me it sounds like multiple steps into the future:
- First a webapp has to have the capability to notify just one device, so in this case your browser and not also your phone. I cant think of an app where you dont receive double notifications on web+mobile (or triple with a smartwatch).
- The webapp then needs to be smart enough to dynamically select the "most active" device to send the notification to.
- The new feature can then be used as a workaround for "incorrectly" classifying your computer as an inactive device, because you are not interacting with the webpage anymore.
being spied on supposedly so the system can decide where to send you messages is a bad idea.
An opt-in system to allow GPS (or idle detection) is an explicit control, but it is not toggling the usage of this low level feature, which is the important part that I want to approve. Approvals should not be blanket.