As someone who has worked with WebAudio extensively, and have opened and read many issues in the bug tracker and read many of the proposals... this is just not as nefarious as you are making it seem. I don't disagree that this _can_ be abused by ad tracking networks but I do disagree with the premise that it was somehow an oversight of the spec or implementation which led to this (or even worse, intentional). Providing consistent audio behavior across a wide variety of platforms (Linux, OSX, Windows, Android) along with multiple versions of all those platforms and the myriad hardware in the actual devices is actually just pretty hard. The boring answer here is that to provide low latency audio to support things like games, a lot of decisions have to made about what buffer sizes are appropriate for the underlying hardware and this is what ultimately exposes some information about audio latency on the system. Some of those decisions are limited by the audio APIs of the OS. Some are limited by the capabilities of the hardware. Some are workaround for obscure bugs in either layer. The point is that, as with most software, compromises are made to support an API that people actually need or want to use to make stuff. I also don't think audio latency information is really "highly unique". There are only a handful of buffer sizes which are reasonable based on the desired sample rate and are mostly limited by the OS, meaning at best you can probably identify a persons OS via the AudioContext. Furthermore, I have seen API "improvements" and requests rejected outright due to possibly exposing fingerprinting information. Things that would be really useful to applications which are building audio-centric software won't be implemented because the team takes this issue seriously.