Your Smartphone’s battery life could now get you tracked

Researchers have recently found out that feature of the HTML5 specification allows websites to find out how much battery power is left on the device and then more information can be found out about your location and online activity.

But that same information can be used to identify phones as they move around the internet, allowing people to be tracked.

Websites and the scripts that run on them do not have to ask customers’ permission to see how a lot cost is left, so telephones will reply to the request to say how a lot cost they’ve and the way lengthy it’s going to take them to energy again up.

Researchers have pointed out the information a website receives is specific and even contains the estimated time in seconds the battery will take to fully discharge along with the exact battery percentage remaining. What it does is report the battery status of users devices so that the site can help lessen the load on the battery preserving charge.

But batteries? Batteries have always been our friends.

On Linux, Firefox reads battery level info using a Linux tool called UPower – which was ultimately the source of this more comprehensive power-management data.

Battery properties available to websites include the level, chargingTime, and dischargingTime by calling the navigator.getBattery() method in JavaScript. “Moreover, in case the user leaves these sites but then, shortly afterwards, visits another site with the same third-party script, the readings would likely be utilised to help in linking the current visit with the preceding ones”.

“Our analysis shows that the risk is much higher for old or used batteries with reduced capacities, as the battery capacity may potentially serve as a tracking identifier”, the report added.

“The analysis of Web standards, APIs and their implementations can reveal unexpected Web privacy problems by studying the information exposed to Web pages”, the authors concluded.

What is interesting, is the same technique can be used to identify devices that are being used behind corporate infrastructures such as NAT’s and VPN’s.

A team of security researchers have published a paper titled “The Leaking Battery” in which they discuss the kind of information a battery is spilling about us. One could use Tor, a Firefox-based browser with advanced privacy and security features, to hide their identity, researchers noted.