[webkit-dev] Proposal: Remove Battery Status API code

Brady Eidson beidson at apple.com
Sun Oct 30 17:14:51 PDT 2016


There's code in the tree to support the W3C Battery Status API.

A recent study showed the extent of the risk (discussion and link to study https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com/battery-status-readout-as-a-privacy-risk/) which led to Mozilla first making the API less precise (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1124127) but then eventually removing it altogether (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1313580)

Apple has never enabled this on their ports, one reason being concern for abuse in fingerprinting/tracking. 
The study seems to be a strong second opinion backing this concern.
Mozilla's actions demonstrate another vendor not seeing the API being useful enough to outweigh the user concern.

As one of the voices for Apple's ports I think the above episode further cements our concern in ever enabling the API.

As one of the voices for WebKit as a whole I think above episode suggests we should just remove the code from the tree altogether.

What to other Apple folks think? What do port maintainers who enable the API think?

Thanks,
~Brady



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