The Independent: Phone batteries can be used to spy on their owners, could track people around the internet.
http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwyIy1pCI
Hmm, so the phone gives off charge number and time to discharge. Then an organization that sees the same pattern over multiple sites could see that it is the same device. I am not sure how big a deal this is. Your IP address is also passed around, as is a host of other ENV data that could identify you across sites. Looks like the feature could be disabled in Firefox.
Doesn't seem like a big deal unless there's lots of decimal places on the charge. In that case the charge used in in-between pages is a bit of unknown quantity.
Having done (in Pzyche) mass fingerprinting in users this, on it's own, doesn't seem like a big deal..
However, when added to all the other data a user gives you the combined entropy is probably large enough to give a very high chance of successful IDing.
The battery metric alone value is low, but in all these things it's like a dripping tap filling up a bath. One drop on it's own isn't a big deal, but collectively those drops add up
The full paper is here - https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/616.pdf
Right. I remember there was a website where it would give you a footprint of how unique your signature is by looking at lots of available browser data, stuff like UA (which actually gives out a lot of data these days including OS & browser build version), encoding, language accepting. Even if you mask your IP, there is still a lot of data that stays consistent on your computer but has a lot of variation from computer to computer. Battery info is just another piece of the puzzle.
Anybody remember that website? I think it was posted at the old core some years back.
this one lm?
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Yeah, that's it. Thanks Dras!
>Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 5,678,573 tested so far.
And that is from a very run of the mill Dell laptop running Windows 7.
I'm unique too.
panopticlick reports that my mobile shares footprint with 1 other user. I'm now wondering whether I've done it on that phone before.