[mediacapture-fromelement] Investigate and document the fingerprintability of user media rendering

tomrittervg has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/mediacapture-fromelement:

== Investigate and document the fingerprintability of user media rendering ==
>From what I can see, this allows a website to view how a UA renders a <canvas> or <media> element. Canvas in particular is used quite pervasively throughout the web to fingerprint and track users by exploiting subtle rendering differences (very different from its intended purpose.)

I've never seen a study done on whether or not <media> is rendered differently on different browsers, but as this is the first time (I think) users' rendering of media will be exposed to the web, it seems the responsible thing to do for the draft is to investigate this and document it negatively or positively - and if users rendering is in fact different, what if anything a UA can do about it. (I believe this is behind a permission prompt, so that's fortunately a large barrier against passive tracking, but the prompt might incorporate a warning, since I don't think a user would ever understand "Take a video of your gameplay" to also imply "Allow this website to uniquely identify you".)

Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/mediacapture-fromelement/issues/68 using your GitHub account

Received on Monday, 4 December 2017 13:43:08 UTC