The ideal use of this API was that websites may get to know whenever a user is low on battery and they may disable a few power consuming features to extend battery life.
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The World Wide Web Consortium debuted the battery status API back in 2012 with the goal of helping websites maximize the battery life of mobile devices that visit them.
“A third-party script that is present across multiple websites can link users’ visits in a short time interval by exploiting the battery information provided to Web scripts”, noted the researchers.
A team of security researchers have demonstrated that phone batteries can be used to identify their owners and track them around the internet, regardless of the privacy measures taken by them. If the two visits are made within half a minute of each other (before the battery status API updates), the site could potentially link the user using data from the API.
However, the recent research has raised doubts about the W3C’s claims.
“In theory it might be feasible to use it just basing on the standard Battery API – although admittedly with limited performance”, Lukasz Olejnik, one of the researchers, told the Telegraph.
The feature, called the Battery Status API, allows websites to check your battery levels so precisely that websites can basically create a unique fingerprint for each device to track your surfing activity.
The specific method they expose in their paper has been fixed by Firefox as of June this year, after they filed a bug report pointing out inconsistencies in its implementation of battery level reporting across different platforms.
“The API defined in this specification is used to determine the battery status of the hosting device”, explains the W3C, which also says that the information collected has a minimal impact on privacy.
A new study suggests that even a battery could reveal enough information about us. That info can then be used as a approach of figuring out the telephones themselves, with out their customers ever figuring out.
Google Maps is already doing its best to make sure you never have any privacy, and now it turns out you can be tracked via the battery life in your smartphone.
The data that other operating systems such as Windows, OSX and Android and browsers gather is rounded to a lower degree, so there are not as many possible combinations of data and it is more hard to zone in on a user.
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Old batteries with higher capacities are even at bigger risk and the researchers have sent all this information to Firefox in order to provide the proper modifications.
