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Google now tells criminals when Chrome users are ‘idle.’ What could go wrong?

October 7, 2021

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When Google released Chrome 94 for Android (and desktop), it slipped in some naughty capabilities via an API called Idle Detection.

“The Idle Detection API notifies developers when a user is idle, indicating such things as lack of interaction with the keyboard, mouse, screen, activation of a screensaver, locking of the screen, or moving to a different screen. A developer-defined threshold triggers the notification,” Google said in a blog post. “Applications that facilitate collaboration require more global signals about whether the user is idle than are provided by existing mechanisms that only consider a user’s interaction with the application’s own tab.”

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