1528984 - photo and audio permissions modal appear without explanation

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1450762

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Overlays, defect)

Description

[janiceahn7]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:67.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/67.0

Steps to reproduce:

Visited various websites on android, including https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/yogurt-pancakes/

Actual results:

Video and Audio permissions modals pop up without explanation about 1) Why user is seeing this and what it means for them to Allow, Deny, and check the box not to see this again. The consequences are opaque and the user needs some information to make a decision. If user taps Deny but doesn't check the box not to see this again, the modals continue to appear without ceasing, leading user potentially to select Allow or don't ever show this again, just to avoid the modal interruptions—but again, user is not actually given help in understanding what any choice actually means.

Expected results:

There should be copy explaining what it means for the user to give permission, so that user can make an informed choice—and also, so they understand that "Mozilla fights for them," not Mozilla annoys them without reason.

Comment 1

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Couldn't reproduce the issue with that URL, but bug 1450762 should have improved things starting from Firefox 66 by no longer requesting those permissions in those situations.
I.e. you should now only get the permissions request if a page wants to access the camera and/or microphone for real. If you're still seeing issues even after the update to Firefox 66 becomes available, please let us know.

What used to happen was that some websites wanted to list what kinds of audio/video devices were available [1] and Firefox would request the system level permissions already in response to that.

[1] A generous interpretation would be in order to to adjust their UI depending on what capabilities were available, a less generous one that it's simply an attempt in fingerprinting.