Re: Notes of June 30 teleconference

TL;DR: +1 to return to CR for now

On Fri, 01 Jul 2016 07:59:25 +0200, Marcos Caceres <marcos@marcosc.com>  
wrote:

> On July 1, 2016 at 12:38:11 AM, Dominique Hazael-Massieux (dom@w3.org)  
> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Since we were only 3 on the call, I've taken quick notes rather than
>> formal minutes:
>>
>> * after discussion with the Director, the likely next step for Battery
>> will be to publish an updated Proposed Recommendation (Dom in charge,
>> pun intended)
>
> Mozilla's DOM Team is considering removing the Battery API from Gecko
> because of the recent abuse by companies like Uber [1] - and because
> of a lack of credible set of use cases. Abuses like that harm users
> and the credibility of apps in general. Or, if we don't remove it, we
> will likely just get it to return the equivalent of "full" or
> "unknown".

I'm not sure that this is a rationale to remove it - there are plenty of  
cases where apps can do rational things, like an email app cutting back to  
a low-bandwidth mode.

The fact that things which sell stuff to people might take advantage of  
knowing they are vulnerable probably belongs in the privacy  
considerations, and certainly should be considered in deciding to  
whitelist / blacklist / warn users about giving out information.

> Since we (the WG) started working on this API, the OS landscape has
> changed significantly: when we started, OSs were not doing a great job
> with battery management, and we thought it would be a good idea to
> allow developers some control. However, this change in recent years
> with better battery/power management at the OS level (e.g., MacOS and
> iOS have special battery saving modes that operate at the OS level
> after a certain threshold is passed - like 20% on the phone, and 5% on
> a Mac... I'm sure Android and Windows probably have similar features).

Yes there are similar features on at least some other OS, although I think  
not all.

But while on the one hand tracking a user is something that should only be  
done with informed consent - something that is far less common than "some  
user interaction that I can plausibly argue means they asked for this" -  
enabling stuff that runs a lot to have more ability to do the right thing  
is useful, although we need to be clear that this likely makes the power  
to do exactly the wrong thing available.

> As such, we should consider not making it a recommendation at all and
> just scrapping battery entirely.

I'm not sure that helps anything except the people who claim that apps are  
better than the web. If we do keep it, we need to be thoughtful about  
helping users understand the way it might be used against them, so they  
make more informed decisions than they do in the app world.

> [1]  
> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/uber-knows-when-your-phone-is-about-to-run-out-of-battery-a7042416.html

Just 2 cents worth

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
  chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2016 00:27:51 UTC