There are many different ways that can be used to track someone online, but have you ever considered battery status as a way to track someone online? If you haven’t, don’t worry as you’re not alone as we’re sure that many have probably not even thought that was even a possibility, but unfortunately it is.According to research conducted by Steve Engelhard and Arvind Narayanan of Stanford University (via The Next Web), it seems that they have figured out a way to track someone online using nothing but their battery status, which is through the battery percentage and the remaining time left on the battery.
The Guardian reports, “Suppose a user loaded their church website in their version of Firefox, and then opened up the website for a satanic cult using a Chrome browser in private browsing mode piped through a secure VPN. Ordinarily, the two connections should be very difficult to associate with one another, but an advert that was loaded on both pages at once would be able to tell that the two devices were almost certainly the same, with the certainty increasing the longer they stayed connected.”
What makes this worse is the fact that there really isn’t anything that we can do to mitigate this, save for plugging your device into the power outlet. As to what someone could do with this information, researcher Lukasz Olejnik suggests that companies could try and monetize this where because they know your battery is dying, you could be desperate enough to pay more for something.