Firefox Gets Privacy Boost By Disabling Proximity and Ambient Light Sensor APIs (bleepingcomputer.com)

Stating with Firefox 60 -- expected to be released in May 2018 -- websites won't be able to use Firefox to access data from sensors that provide proximity distances and ambient light information. From a report: Firefox was allowing websites to access this data via the W3C Proximity and Ambient Light APIs. But at the start of the month, Mozilla engineers decided to disable access to these two APIs by default. The APIs won't be removed, but their status is now controlled by two Firefox flags that will ship disabled by default. This means users will have to manually enable the two flags before any website can use Firefox to extract proximity and ambient light data from the device's underlying sensors. The two flags will be available in Firefox's about:config settings page. The screenshot below shows the latest Firefox Nightly version, where the two flags are now disabled, while other sensor APIs are enabled.

Comments

Proximity? To what? Fingers to keyboard?

[jabberw0k]

Why would anyone even want a device that has invasive sensors in it?

Re:Stop putting the operating system in the browse

[FatdogHaiku]

So you would prefer a policy such that newly encountered domains default to script off. Under this policy, how would a web application that falls into "the small amount of use case that actually need scripting" demonstrate to the user that it is worthy of "opt in explicit consent"?

Isn't that exactly what the noscript HTML tag is for?
You hit a page that thinks it needs scripting and you get a message asking you to enable it... maybe showing a GIF promising all kinds of wonderful things the site can do for you..