Apple Patents Polluting Facebook, Google Profiles 142
theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Apple an odd patent on Techniques to Pollute Electronic Profiling, which presumably might concern the targeted ad revenue-hungry folks at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn (and their investors). The patent, apparently assigned to Apple from Novell, is designed to thwart 'dataveillance techniques from automated Litter Brothers,' including lawful targeted and aggressive marketing tactics. Creating cloned identities that are 'intentionally populated with divergent information [e,g., fake phone numbers, email accounts, credit or debit card accounts],' explains the patent, 'circumvents the reliability and usefulness of dataveillance used by network eavesdroppers and effectively provides greater privacy over the network to principals.'"
Re:Makes Sense Now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't know if evil or good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Evil because it's fucking with Google.
Why is fucking with Google evil?
And can someone please translate "dataveillance techniques from automated Litter Brothers" to English?
Re:So Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has a patent to fool bots that aggregate people's data.
Interesting how even this can be spun to something negative.
What is it good for (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't know if evil or good. (Score:5, Insightful)
So does Apple. So do many companies. It doesn't give either Apple nor Google a free pass when they do something unpleasant though.
Re:So Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't know if evil or good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Google is a marketing company. That so many traditionally anti-marketing techies don't grasp this just means they are a very good marketing company.