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A Privacy Analysis of the HTML5 Battery Status API [pdf] (iacr.org)
27 points by r721 on July 7, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



Why would you even give websites that info?


Just off the top of my head...

- Disable the HTML5 Vibration API if battery power is low.

- Increased network activity is battery is full or charging.

- Project how much time a user has to complete an activity before the battery runs out.

- Change page colour scheme to reduce battery drain.

This is a really useful API - especially if it reduces "range anxiety" for mobile users.


- Vibration should be disabled by the OS, not the apps.

- Network activity should be as predictable as possible, because people often have to pay by the megabyte, and any "smart" changes in activity increase the chance that people will be unpleasantly surprised.

- The OS should predict remaining battery life, not the apps. If there's going to be a new API it should let the apps inform the OS of future activity so the OS can make better predictions.

- Changing color to reduce battery drain only makes a noticeable difference with OLED. It will annoy the more common LCD users for no benefit to them.


It also assumes lower battery power always means you want lower power consumption. You could have a full battery but not have a charger with you and want to make it last as long as possible.


All of those are features the OS should manage. In particular, estimating runtime is a function laptops have had since they existed.


You wouldn't necessarily.

Main use-case I believe was FirefoxOS -- at least the first time I heard it mentioned was during an FirefoxOS talk where they discussed other hardware-y APIs and trying to get them standardised.

It would also be useful for an OS that supported HTML5 native apps. Additionally having a standard API gives projects like Phonegap an API to 'target' when exposing native device APIs to JavaScript.


Yeah, this was part of WebAPI back in 2012, and that has a lot more hardware APIs:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI


So that applications can go light on the battery if needed? For example disabling thumbnails and sound, having longer polling intervals, ...


I'm having a hard time imagining any legitimate use cases for this API at all.


The Great Suspender uses this.


Does it really? That's neat- it's one of the few extensions that can actually curb chrome's memory eating without being intrusive.


I just skimmed the article, but it seems like this is only a concern for Firefox running on Linux due to the enhanced precision.




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