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This is a (very old) browser API: https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-battery-status-20141209/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-battery-status-20141209/ It was once imp

This is a (very old) browser API: https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-battery-status-20141209/ https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-battery-status-20141209/ It was once implemented in Firefox too and then disabled outside internal pages. It's from an era of trying to standardize all the APIs needed for Firefox OS apps: https://caniuse.com/battery-status https://caniuse.com/battery-status Both iOS and Android apps have this capability, ex. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/1620045-isbatterymonitoringenabled https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/162... Since the entropy is coarse over the entire population you could debate the privacy implications (ex. Time zone is more specific and stable). Restricting it to only saved PWAs to match the privacy model of native apps seems reasonable though. Someone should propose the change to Chrome.

duskwuff 3y ago
> ex. Time zone is more specific and stable Time zone is also much less useful for fingerprinting because it's tightly correlated with other signals like IP location and language preference. If you already know that a user's IP is somewhere in California, the additional information that they're using the Pacific time zone adds little value. (If a user's time zone doesn't agree with their geolocation, that's certainly a signal -- but it's going to be an uncommon one.)