That does nothing but start an arms race. Fine, audio "works" but do you get noise? Can you read back the sounds you play? No, right? It doesn't work, QED. Now the platform needs to fake the noise.
Likewise for any other hardware access you want, and most of them are harder. How do you fake local storage without storing anything? How do you fake Bluetooth access without virtualizing an entire device? Do you fake the screen dimensions to look like something else? Input latency? Where does it stop?
No, "does this work" is among the easiest questions to answer in technology. We aren't going to win this war.
No, but you also can’t do that if the user approves your app’s permission to play audio, but has the volume permanently turned down to zero.
> local storage
Give the app a temporary, space-constrained store that isn’t shared with other apps.
> bluetooth
Don’t let apps access raw bluetooth signals, but instead ask the platform to display a pairing interface (possibly with a custom stylesheet), ask the platform to call you back when a specific device is in range, etc.
> screen dimensions
Not personal data.
> input latency
Fudge the numbers even when the user grants permission.
This isn’t a war, it’s just engineering for the benefit and autonomy of the user, and not the platforms’ commercial interests.
Fingerprinting and other quasi-malware techniques being used by desirable third party software are absolutely a war, otherwise we wouldn't have this permission structure in place in the first place. And as much as you believe the contrary, Alibaba et. al. are 100% smarter than you about how to exploit these tricks and will win.
I don’t appreciate the personal attack. You don’t know me.
Permissions have nothing to do with preventing fingerprinting, they have to do with user control. Every permission you add that the app can inspect is one extra bit of fingerprint, so it’s actually worse.
In TFA’s case, if the app was simply not hooked up to an actual audio sink, they would still be able to use this mechanism for fingerprinting, since it’s the processing pipeline itself that leaves the fingerprint.
Note that the article isn’t calling out for fingerprinting specifically. I’m sure AliExpress does more fingerprinting than this. The problem is specifically that they’re interfering with multipoint Bluetooth audio.
The best you can do on the modern web is reduce your fingerprint footprint, though it comes at a cost of websites breaking from JS disabling, or local time zone anonymisation.
Soundd like a nightmare to build legitimate apps if you for example are building an app that uses the camera but you can’t in anyway tell that using the camera fails (because user had denied the permission 6 months ago and has no memory of it) and instead of being able to give a helpful error you are just ending up with I am guessing fake images (maybe just a black screen).
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try. What about a popup saying "xyz has tried to access the camera a lot lately, continue blocking?"? Or apps can apply for set of 'core permissions' that can't be denied but are much more tightly controlled? Apple and Google are some of the biggest companies in the world, they don't deserve as much leeway as you're offering.
By design. This doesn’t need to be the case. It should be impossible to tell you have denied a permission.
In TFA’s case, the browser could just keep processing audio but never hook it up to a real audio sink.