Beware ! Advertisers are Tracking you via Mobile Battery Status

Is my smartphone battery leaking details about me?

Unfortunately, YES!

Forget about supercookies, apps, and malware; your smartphone battery status is enough to monitor your online activity, according to a new report.

In 2015, researchers from Stanford University demonstrated a way to track users' locations – with up to 90 percent accuracy – by measuring the battery usage of the phone over a certain time.

The latest threat is much worse.

Two security researchers, Steve Engelhard and Arvind Narayanan, from Princeton University, have published a paper describing how phone's battery status has already been used to track users across different websites.

The issue is due to the Battery Status API (application programming interface).

How Does Battery Status API Help Advertisers Track You?

The battery status API was first introduced in HTML5 and had already shipped in browsers including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera by August last year.

The API is intended to allow site owners to see the percentage of battery life left on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone in an effort to deliver an energy-efficient version of their sites.

However, researchers warned last year about the API’s potential threat that could turn your battery level into a "fingerprintable" tracking identifier.

The researchers found that a combination of battery life loss in seconds and battery life as a percentage offers 14 Million different combinations, potentially providing a pseudo-unique identifier for each device that can be used to pinpoint specific devices between sites they visit.

Now, the last year's research has grown into a proper threat.

Advertisers Are Tracking You via your Battery Status

One of those researchers named Lukasz Olejnik has published a blog post this week, saying that companies are currently leveraging the potential of this battery status information.

"Some companies may be analyzing the possibility of monetising the access to battery levels," he writes. "When a battery is running low, people might be prone to some - otherwise different - decisions. In such circumstances, users will agree to pay more for a service."

Olejnik underlined the latest research by Engelhard and Narayanan, who discovered two tracking scripts of shady code running on the Internet at large scale, which take advantage of battery status API and currently tracking users.

The duo explains that they observed the behavior of two actual scripts and suggested the companies and other entities are perhaps leveraging this technique for their own purposes.

"These features are combined with other identifying features used to fingerprint a device," the researchers write in their paper titled, "Online Tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis."

For in-depth information, you can head on to the research paper [PDF].

Here's come the worst part of this attack:

There's hardly any way to mitigate against this attack. Nothing works: Deleting browser cookies or using VPNs and AdBlockers will not solve your problem.

The only option is to plug your smartphone into the mains.

"Some companies may be analyzing the possibility of monetising the access to battery levels," Olejnik writes.

Over two months ago, Uber's head of economic research Keith Chen said the company had been monitoring the battery life of its users, as it knows users are more likely to pay a much higher price to hire a cab when their phone's battery is close to dying.

Opera’s Power Saving Mode Offers Twice the Laptop Battery Life as Chrome

Opera is currently on a roll. As the date of its buyout through a Chinese consortium come closer, it is trying what it can to get as many users on board as possible. The latest such feature is the new Power saving mode, available currently only on the developer version of Opera but could make its way to the users soon.

The feature is targeted specially towards users who are usually on the move and want to get the most out of their battery life. Opera claims that its browser with the power saving mode on can result in a battery life which is twice that of contemporary browsers such as Firefox and Chrome.

Opera has done a few things to make this possible. When in the mode, the activity on background tab hinders, frame rate reduces, animations are paused, while unused plug-ins are paused. JavaScript use is scheduled more prudently, while more work is loaded at hardware acceleration.

To verify these findings, Opera tested its claims on two different laptops from Lenovo and Dell, and found that while the ones without the setting ran out of juice in under two hours, the ones running the power saving mode reached almost three.

The option can be accessed whenever your laptop is disconnected from its charger. The browser will alert you once your battery reaches 20 percent to turn on the mode.

Opera has been adding features to its portfolio quite rigorously. It first became the initial mainstream browser to feature a built-in ad-blocker (which is both faster and less of a resource-hog than AdBlock) then it brought the same feature on mobile. It also brought a built-in VPN to its users, meaning this power saver is just a link in this chain of developments.

This Tiny Computer Runs on Radio Waves Powered wirelessly & hasn't battery

No matter how smart and fast your devices would be, the biggest issue is always with the battery technology.

Whenever you go to buy any electronic gadget — smartphone, laptop, or any wearable — the most important specification isn’t its processor speed or its camera quality but its Battery Backup, which is not getting better any time soon.

What if you could eliminate the very thing entirely?

Well, that's exactly what the electrical engineers from the University of Washington has developed.

A team of researchers from the University of Washington’s Sensor Lab and the Delft University of Technology has developed a new gadget that doesn’t need a battery or any external power source to keep it powered; rather it works on radio waves.

So, this means you have to turn on your radio every time to keep this device charged. Right?

No, you don’t need to do this at all, because the device sucks radio waves out of the air and then converts them into electricity.

Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform

Dubbed Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP), the device is a combination sensor and computing chip that uses a standard off-the-shelf RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) reader to suck in radio waves and convert them into electricity.

Though the WISP is not designed to compete with the chips in your computer or even your smartphone, it has as much processing power as the Fitbit, which is enough to run sensors and transmit data.

The discovery could highly transform the Internet of Things (IoT) world as the WISP is even more low maintenance compared to Bluetooth Low Energy sensor chips being used today.

The next step in making the WISP usability even more convenient and easy is to create Wisent that would allow for wireless programming of the WISP. For this, the team has recently collaborated with the Delft University of Technology.

With the help of Wisent, the WISP can be programmed wirelessly and uses the very same radio waves to communicate.

"So far WISP required cables to reprogramme it, nullifying the advantage of battery-less-ness. Therefore, we present Wisent, a protocol that allows WISP to be reprogrammed wirelessly," said Przemysław Pawełczak, assistant professor at the TU Delft’s Embedded Software group.

"Our vision is to have truly wirelessly reprogrammable software-defined battery-less computers wherever and whenever we want."

For more details, you can head on to the research paper [PDF].

Though the ultimate aim of WISP is in fully realizing the Internet of Things and giving "dumb" objects some smartness, it might even find its way into smartphones as a sort of emergency backup calling module that works even when your phone’s battery is dead.

However, there is no detail on when the WISP will be made available for purchase, or how much it will cost.