Re: Bug 23934 - Proposal: Always launch permission prompt to avoid leakage

On 2013-12-11 11:27, Eric Rescorla wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 6:16 PM, Adam Bergkvist
> <adam.bergkvist@ericsson.com> wrote:
>> On 2013-12-10 02:26, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>>>
>>> For the record, I am opposed to this entire piece of Jan-Ivar's proposal.
>>>
>>> As has been observed many times, there are plenty of opportunities
>>> for fingerprinting and so going through these gyrations to make
>>> it fractionally more difficult is silly.
>>
>>
>> I think there's more to this than only protecting against fingerprinting.
>
> Perhaps, but the only argument I have heard for why this needs to
> be a specification requirement is fingerprinting.
>
>
>> IMO, prompting for the getUserMedia() *request* itself, not only if some
>> devices survived the exclusion process have benefits.
>>
>> * More consistent behavior when no devices pass the constraints. When this
>> happens in our current model, the user can be presented with anything from
>> nothing, the app just halts, to a detailed explanation of what went wrong;
>> depending on how the app is programmed to handle this case. You could argue
>> that the app that does nothing is badly written (and I agree), but if we can
>> make users lives better even in these cases I think we should.
>
> I totally disagree. This is a programming environment and it's not
> the browser's job to displace the programmer.
>
>
>
>> * We could offer alternative actions when no devices pass the constrains.
>>
>>   - Ask the user to connect a new device.
>>
>>   - Offer the user to select a media file that will act as a device (This has
>> been a use-case from very early on).
>>
>>   - Give the user the option to report, to the app, what went wrong so it can
>> explain in detail why you don't have the hardware required.
>
> These are all fine things, but they are exactly the kind of fine things that
> the app knows better than the browser manufacturer to offer
>

Only being able to select a file as a media source when the app has 
opted in on that feature defeats the purpose of selecting a file, 
instead of a camera, for privacy reasons (and to not get locked out by 
aggressive mandatory constraints).

/Adam

Received on Thursday, 12 December 2013 08:42:43 UTC