Re: [w3c/ServiceWorker] Expose GeoLocation to workers (#745)

> How do you think the privacy and security aspects of this should be handled?

> Especially on mobile, screen space is limited. A permanent indicator like a notification might be too much

FWIW, I think that might be an _extremely_ reasonable way to handle it.

e.g. Google Maps (during active navigation) and Waze (_whenever_ it's runnning) do exactly this: and I'd say that if you "make" the app display a conspicuous location, that's far preferable to allowing it to discreetly siphon location data without much ado (as e.g. the Google Location Services are uniquely privileged to)…

The status-quo-bar for "respects privacy" on e.g. Android is quite low at the moment, but I think that "have a background-notif up _while the app is monitoring your location_" would leave nobody feeling violated, while not being that visually-disruptive.

The only cases I can come up with offhand in which a background-notif-during-location-access à la Waze might be a _bit_ visually-much are:

* someone's e.g. re-implementing the entirety of Tasker as a PWA
* Geofencing _per se_ (which might end up being its own, separate can of worms)

But in all other cases, I think that this is the only natural solution. Perhaps it could be augmented by requiring the app to be re-opened to re-access GPS after it's closed its access (and thus vanished its notification)?

(My use-case is: I've created a bike-ride tracking "webapp" in just a few hundred lines of JS; it's so much nicer of a development environment than the whole SDK mess; but I would _really like_ to be able to allow users to turn their screens off during the ride while still collecting telemetry. This seems like such a natural thing to expect!)

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Received on Saturday, 14 November 2020 06:33:59 UTC