There is an obvious privacy concern that this API lets a website observe whether a person is near the device or not.
Google's Reilly Grant, one of the proposal's owners on the Chromium team, asked for feedback on the WebKit mailing list, WebKit being the browser engine used by Apple for Safari.Īpple's Ryosuke Niwa responded that: 'Our concerns are not limited to fingerprinting. In addition, such coarse patterns could be used by websites to surreptiously max-out local compute resources for proof-of-work computations, wasting electricity (cost to user, increasing carbon footprint) without the user’s consent or perhaps even awareness.' lunchtime), and using that for proactive psychological manipulation (e.g. Mozilla web standards lead Tantek Çelik said on GitHub: 'I consider the Idle Detection API too tempting of an opportunity for surveillance capitalism motivated websites to invade an aspect of the user’s physical privacy, keep longterm records of physical user behaviors, discerning daily rhythms (e.g. Our concerns are not limited to fingerprinting.
Support for the API was expressed by developers from Slack and Google Chat, among others.
