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WHEN YOU THINK about your smartphone battery, your biggest concern is usually ‘how long will it last’, but you may have another problem to take into consideration.
A team of security researchers have found that phone batteries can be used to identify its owners and track them across the internet, regardless of the privacy measures taken.
The issue comes from a piece of software on HTML5, the technology used to structure and present sites on the web, which tells websites how much battery is left in a user’s phone. The original intention is to allow websites to know if a phone’s battery is running low, and help preserve it.
However, websites (or the scripts running them) don’t need to ask a user permission to check how much charge is left. Instead, phones automatically tell them how much charge is left and how long it’d take to return to a full charge.
The same information can be used to identify users and track them as they visit different sites. By noting these details and seeing if a phone with similar details appears on other pages, it could work out what pages that user visited, even if they’re using private browsing or a VPN (virtual private network).
This would apply more to short-term visits as the researchers note the risk of long-term tracking with this information “may be negligible”. If a user visits a site normally, but returns a moment later using a browser’s private mode, then the likelihood of someone identifying the two visits as the same is higher.
The paper, called ‘The leaking battery: A privacy analysis of the HTML5 battery status API‘, recommends that sites should ask permission to access the battery information instead of doing it automatically.
The researchers also suggest that users should be provided with more information about how their battery information is actually used, and to reduce the precision of battery level readouts, rounding off the numbers instead of giving exact figures.
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Its a spy and a tracker in your pocket, never forget that.
Either that or you’ve just fooked your rfid chip and won’t be able to use any near field communication to do anything with your phone ever again. Granted nfc doesn’t have a million and one uses right now, but give it a while and it could be very handy.
False.
Good to know George.
If you do as George suggests, you will disable near field communication (NFC). Only do this if you don’t want or use NFC.
Try using nfc though, I bet you did that after watching that nutcase on YouTube removing his :)
Whatever about spying batteries, when are smartphones going to have batteries that last longer then a day..anyone??
It’s a double edged sword. If you are missing on a mountain then your battery can be used to trace you. However if your a criminal then it can be used to blow your alibi. Big Brother technically is always watching. Ping!
It can probably only ping your battery to the nearest mast though – not much good if you’re injured on a mountain…
No need to spy,they are welcome to know who or where I am anytime Sure I couldn’t give a ****. Nothing to hide at all
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say
my phone battery is always undercover !
My phone battery is always nearly dead (or at least, that’s how it seems…).
If any agency or country told we had to carry a tracking device on our person there would be complete uproar but we “all” do it now, some of even have two!!.
It also costs a hell of a lot more than paying for IW and we gladly stump up!!! Imagine standing outside in a hole to prevent Eircom putting in fibre cable!! :) or xxxx says “NO TO MOBILE PHONES” “WE WON’T PAY! (for the phone signal) We have to problem paying up to €600 (via cash or through that 2 year contract) some people like to boast that they have the more expensive one!!
why bring iw into this topic. dont they get enough publicity else where
So a user visits a site A with 27% battery life and then visits site B with 26% or maybe 25% battery life and we are supposed to believe this can be used to track that they are the same user across Sites A&B? Its impossible that the user accessing Site B with 26% battery is someone else entirely is it?
Battery life would not be the only piece of data gathered about that user. Device type, battery life, carrier network… lots of other details furnished which all add up to a unique identifier probably.
Researchers recently proved how they can hack air-gapped computers with nothing more than an old GSM mobile running a custom program detecting signals passing the bus from CPU to GPU isolating signal from the carrier at up to 30m distance (only talking bytes, not Mb’s of data) and it’s been proven for quiet a few years how with the right equipment every letter you type can be picked up and sniffed from the minute voltage drop on the power entering your house as each key is pressed so this is well within the realms of possibility and a likely a lot easier to implement when the user willingly access sites running such scripts. The Facebook already does something similar with the amount of metadata it collects from your phone.
Who cares. If the NSA are spying on my web history they’re going to be bored out of their skulls.
it sounds the battery the is one of dangerous part?
http://batterychargersexpert.com
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