Laptop and mobile batteries are leaking your information: Research

If you think that you can hide your identity by switching to incognito mode on your web-browser or using the proximity tool, then you are deeply mistaken. A new research has revealed that the battery of the device also makes public a lot of information about us.

A team of security researchers has published a paper titled ‘The Leaking Battery’ which discusses the information that device batteries are making public about us. Researchers have said that this is not happening due to any malware, rather HTML5, the technology used for the World Wide Web, is behind it.

HTML5’s Battery API provides a website with information about the remaining battery on a visitor’s device. Actually, the purpose of this feature is to give information about the visitor’s device to the web publisher. For example, if a device does not have much battery left, then in such a situation a web publisher can offer a less energy consuming version of its website to the visitor.

But during this time, information like how much battery life is left in the device, how much time it will take to completely discharge and the current charge level are shared due to this feature. The more we browse the website, the more information the website gets. In such a situation, it becomes possible to collect all this information about us in one place and the risk of our identity becoming public also increases.

“Many websites contain a third-party script that can link each of a user’s visits within a limited time frame. This is made possible by the information the web script receives about the battery,” the study reads.

It further reads, “The readings will be the same on every site because the update intervals are also the same. In this way the details of all your visits are stored with the third party script. Apart from this, even if you leave these sites, But after some time they visit another site where the same third-party script is present. In such a situation, it is possible that these readings can be used to link the current visit with the old one.

Researchers have reported that in June 2015, support for Battery Status API was available on web browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Researchers say that users can use Tor, a browser based on Firefox, for more privacy and security.