As a website designer, I see legitimate reasons for the web page being able to read this kind of information locally, on the client side. What is disconcerting is that there's no block on sending it back to the server, which doesn't need to know most of it. Browsers need an internal firewall to ensure locally collected data is separated from user-entered data intended to be submitted. That firewall clearly doesn't exist and there'll be a prize for the programmer who develops it (but not from the corporate giants).
