Are there any reasons at all not to make this a feature that simply needs/asks 
a permission? 

Perhaps with a short additional text "Allowing might compromise privacy". Not 
only for ambient light and proximity sensors, but especially if you want to 
remove device orientation information too. We already have location and camera 
permissions, for example. They are much bigger privacy issues, but asking for a 
permission is rather ok. 

If a website asks to get permissions for all of those things, it kind of 
deteriorates usability, but it's for the website to decide whether they want to 
have that tradeoff, and for the user to decide whether they trust the website 
or want to allow something.

I am developing a citizen science website for mapping, and it becomes 
impossible if you simply deprecate everything. Perhaps an actual app might do 
the trick, though, but it can be suboptimal.

2018-03-01 14.03.33 UTC+2 Jonathan Kingston wrote:
> As an update here the code has landed in 60 from
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1359076
> 
> This adds:
> - Deprecation warnings for DeviceOrientation and DeviceMotion sensors.
> - Deprecation errors for AmbientLight and Proximity sensors.
> - Preferences to control all 4 sensors independently:
>   - "device.sensors.ambientLight.enabled" - devicelight event and
> DeviceLightEvent constructor.
>   - "device.sensors.proximity.enabled" - deviceproximity, userproximity
> events and  DeviceProximityEvent and UserProximityEvent constructors.
>  - "device.sensors.motion.enabled" - devicemotion event and
> DeviceMotionEvent constructor.
>  - "device.sensors.orientation.enabled" - deviceorientation event and
> DeviceOrientationEvent constructor.
> - In Nightly and Early beta releases the proximity and light sensors are
> disabled by default.
> 
> My plan is to deprecate light and proximity sensors in Stable Firefox in
> version 62 if no issues arise.
> 
> Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns.
> 
> Thanks
> Jonathan
> 
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 7:01 AM, Anne van Kesteren <ann...@annevk.nl> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Dec 18, 2017 at 7:36 PM, Gervase Markham <g...@mozilla.org> wrote:
> > > appear.in, which supports both audio and video calling via WebRTC, works
> > > in Firefox for Android, although performance is not awesome on my Z3C
> > > Compact.
> > >
> > > It does not blank the screen when you place the device to your ear.
> >
> > There might be more secure ways we can address this use case. E.g.,
> > having a dedicated signal just for that, perhaps only given if the
> > user already granted access to the microphone and such.
> >
> > (And if something does require the full power of the proximity API, we
> > should first work out how to expose it securely. I'm sure folks can
> > come up with use cases for running arbitrary code as root too, but
> > that doesn't mean we can offer it.)
> >
> >
> > --
> > https://annevankesteren.nl/
> > _______________________________________________
> > dev-platform mailing list
> > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org
> > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
> >
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