Re: [deviceorientation] Add API for requesting permission to receive device motion / orientation events (#57)

@richtr - Although I agree that fingerprinting concerns are likely to be solvable with some of the mitigations you mention that is not the only potential privacy concern.

To take one example; even heavily quantized, obfuscated, and reduced-frequency sensor data would give some information about whether the user is standing up or lying down. Whether that is a significant enough privacy concern to require explicit user consent is certainly debatable (most vendors appear not to think so at the moment), but it does appear Apple / WebKit have made their minds up here.

I believe spatial computing use cases on the web would survive a permissions prompt. It would be unfortunate however to have a widely-released iOS version with the API disabled by default **and** without a permissions API implemented.

So I still hope for the final iOS 12.2 release Apple will either have an opt-in permissions API implemented or will decide to flip the default setting until that permissions API is ready. To me that strikes a good balance between addressing privacy concerns but without being quite as hostile to web developers who depend on these features.

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Received on Thursday, 7 February 2019 17:30:01 UTC