Xeroxing Personal Data From Your Browsing History 116
grease_boy writes "Xerox has filed a patent covering a technique to recover demographic information like your age, sex and perhaps even your income by analysing the pattern of web pages you browse. They want to license the technique to online advertisers and shops. Read the full patent here."
Hehe (Score:3, Interesting)
More lame patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More lame patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you read the 20 claims before assuming their technique is obvious?
Re:More lame patents (Score:5, Funny)
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(Runs to patent office, scribbling furiously on bar napkin...)
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I never said that there shouldn't be any software patents, but there should be some standard of innovation required...
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(*) that part wouldn't be very valuable but if they felt it was worth it :)
Most mathematics is nontrivial and highly ingenious, but just because it's non-obvious that still doesn't mean it should be patentable. EVER.
Old jewish woman (Score:2)
Dude...
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Yes! This is a no-brainer and makes complete sense in terms of fairness.
But then why do patents like Amazon's 1-Click get patented? Actually, even this I understand. The
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Gaah! My eyes! It's like someone wrote a maths paper without using any notation, and then put it into legal jargon.
It basically describes the use of statistics to estimate things about a population, nothing that hasn't been done to death in statistics, machine learning, data mining etc.
Re:I said... (Score:1)
Not to mention the 10% or so of the patent that describes a COMPUTER in its constituent parts. It seems to me, if this is necessary, then perhaps the patent is describing an algorithm. But, of course, IANAL.
I said,
Randy.
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Re:More lame patents (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, I tried to get Nortel to implement something similar on their Meridian phone systems back in the early 90's. I thought that by tracking internal phone calls through "Call Detail Records" (CDR - which list the calling extension, called extension, date, time, and call duration), we could see patterns of calls between departments, and determine if repetitive patterns existed, such as many calls between sales and billing at specific times of the month, etc. I thought this might help identify operational issues, inefficiencies, etc. Of course, I was blown off.
Anyone want to give me a job?
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And why did I prepare myself in years of training for such a career? What am I supposed to do with my life now??
Obligitory quote... (Score:2)
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Job? (Score:2)
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One reason marketing likes the whole age/sex/race/income thing, is that they can derive from that some possible information about what you might be interested in, in order to market to you. It's not perfect, as not all 16 year old males with wealthy parents will be interested in buying insanely expensive gaming systems, and not all 85 year old women on a pension will want to just email photos of family around, but it works better than guessing.
So, what they're really after
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I avoid this whole issue by running with Tor. So they're probably going to target some poor chap in China or the middle of Russia as browsing my history.
But now I understand better why I keep getting Japanese versions of eharmony spam mails...
Oh well, such is life. Spam is spam, and spam filters just keep with the flow, and it works for me.
Sorry you uber inquisitive capitalists, I ain't gonna reveal my personality to a corporation just yet. Not until you force me with a brain imp
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It'll be used as smoke and mirrors (Score:3, Interesting)
Thing is, if you think about it... it fits just neatly in the eternal 3-way total war, whee the ad provider tries to shaft both the advertising company and the web master, and in most cases the two try to shaft the ad provider too. Tons of useless metrics exist just so the ad provider can tell some company "here's why you owe us a big pile of money for serving
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And now in a world where it's so easy to get that specific information on hundreds of thousands people, they want to use that specific information to derive less reliable demographic statistics, in order to derive what a particular person might be interested in...
i'm not sure that they want to get information on what you might want to buy based on who you are (because like you said they already know what you might want to buy based on your history), i think they want to know how to pitch their product to you in a better way.
for example, they might know that you are in the market to buy a small car based on the fact that you've visited several other sites that sell small cars or consumer review sites focusing on small cars. but if they also know that you are like
Re:More lame patents (Score:4, Insightful)
What is unfortunate is the fact that asshole companies like Xerox (and its licensees) intend to engage in this particular form of assholish behavior in the first place. But a patent is basically an instrument for preventing people from doing things. If Xerox were granted this one by the PO, it would only play a positive role in the world. It would put Xerox in the position of being able to prevent other asshole companies from mining your browser history for personal data (at least in the fashion described) except under the terms they specify. Conceivably Xerox could prevent anyone from doing it at all simply by not granting licenses. If the EFF had filed this patent with those intentions, none of you would be complaining.
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Graphical User Interface
Mouse
Ethernet
Object Oriented programming
I know we hate software patensts here and all, but calling Xeros an 'asshole' company only based on a single action, is rather feeble, don't you think?
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Re: Extrapolation better than user supplied data? (Score:1)
In order to protect my identity ... (Score:5, Funny)
Get real. This is worthy of a patent? Just by the fact that you're reading this post you're most likely male, some college, etc.
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If it is one an the same, then that makes lesbians just like dirty old men (and slashdot basement dwellers).
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WHO ARE YOU AND GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!~
etc.
And what, exactly, are you implying?
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Not needed at all... Xerox will find that you spend 20 hours a day on Slashdot... and conclude you don't have any girlfriends.... and get your kicks watching porn!
To really confuse Xerox, you need to shop online for diapers, ladies' undergarments, walking sticks, power glasses and valentine's day cards.... besides lurking on Slashdot with insightful comments. That would confuse the hell out of them!
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[Marge] "Whatever you've got planned tonight, count me out!"
Remember, kids... (Score:3, Insightful)
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However, anything with 'click', 'track', or 'xch' in its URL seems to be bin-worthy.
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The domain "2o7.net" seems to be used by some privacy-invader.
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Re:So if I'm looking at bestiality pr0n (Score:5, Funny)
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(oh, wait, I blew it by posting, didn't I? Darn)
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"If God didn't want us fucking livestock, why did he make them so sexy?"
Possibly the best "OMG I can't believe you put that in your sig" so far... unfortunately, they changed it. No, it wasn't mine
Can you say MORE SPAM (Score:1)
Can you patent an illegal process? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Point: a company does not need to do anything "invasive" to track your browsing habits. Back when DoubleClick had a majority share on banner ads, they could track what websites you went to simply based on the referring url when you got
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Point: a company does not need to do anything "invasive" to track your browsing habits. Back when DoubleClick had a majority share on banner ads, they could track what websites you went to simply based on the referring url when you got loaded of their ads on a site.
Which is why whenever I visit a site that I don't trust completely, I start out from a clean, blank page. I'll even go so far as to copy and paste the URLs from google search results to the location bar of a new browser window.
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That doesn't necessarily make it legal. If someone wants to install a piece of spyware and realises what he's doing, that's fine, of course, but for someone who's too clueless to notice, it's not nearly as clear. I might argue tha
Re:Can you patent an illegal process? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not?
The law might change to make the process legal before the patent runs out. But you need to patent it right away to establish priority.
Meanwhile you could sue everybody accused of breaking the law in your particular way.
The police do your investigating and the prosecutor does the work of putting the information together for you, too. And the jailers keep the infringer in a known place for your process server. How convenient.
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Why not?
Fundamentally? A patent is a contract between the government and the patent holder. A fundamental aspect of law is that you can not legally contract for illegal purposes. For example, a contract that included a clause for you to murder someone or steal something is not legal - or at least not that clause. It could be argued that patenting an illegal process would be tantamount to a contract with illegal activity as part and parcel of it.
After all you will either lic
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"The law might change to make the process legal before the patent runs out. But you need to patent it right away to establish priority."
The answer is no, you cannot. First, the patent law clearly says you cannot. Second, public policy says you can't. In courts, patents are given the binding effect of a law---with the same rules for statutory interpretation, etc. So, if you patent an illegal thing, then it would be legal. A patent is "legislated" through the USPTO under a
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Not at all.
A patent is a license to sue anyone who "practices an invention" without the permission of the patent holder. It is NOT a license to practice the invention despite laws to the contrary. (It can't. Laws are made and repealed by the legislative branch. Patents are issued by the executive branch, which does not have the autho
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Actually, it would be more fun and profitable to patent methods for being robbed (such as protecting your throat from the deleterious effects of a sharp knife blade by revealing your debit card PIN). Think about it: you don't always catch the perpertrator (and they're a criminal, ergo unlikely to have much respect for the niceties of Intellectual Property law); but y
Xerox must be doing worse than I thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Now they've reduced themselves to patent trolling in order to pander to marketing scum. Just, wow.
Xerox, my ass. (Score:2, Funny)
PC LOAD TP.
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And what did they get for their troubles? They did the research, other companies (hello Apple) stole, I mean, were "heavily inspired by" their ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC [wikipedia.org]
Just an application... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Divisional applications are made when the examiner determines that more than one invention is claimed in an application and requires the applicant to elect one of the inventions to prosecute on the merits. The claims to a non-elected invention(s) are not examined in that application and must be cancelled
statistical analysis (Score:1)
What a great achievement! (Score:1)
It is like setting up a 2D space, one being the weight and the other the age. Then if person X hangs around the doughnut shop all day, we can assume that (s)he is fat, if (s)he spends the rest of the time at movies watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Spiderman and alike then we can also assume that (s)he is young, so we can assign a vector pointing somewhere in the (fat,young) quadrant. Wow. If the pattern is food, food, movie, food, food, food, movie then we can assume that (s)he
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"Founded in 1970 as part of Xerox Research, then incorporated in 2002 as an independent research business, PARC is celebrated for such innovations as laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing. PARC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation."
So no, they did not disown it, just made it a separate business entity. It is still a Xerox company
This assumes most people passively surf (Score:4, Insightful)
I run a website which sells stuff. Now, it may not be stuff I personally want, but obviously other people do. So, I go through Amazon looking for products to sell. Of course, the advantage is that Amazon recommends items to me that I might sell to the other people reading my site, so it works out, but still, Amazon has a screwed up image of what I want as an individual.
Now imagine all these people who do searches online to find crap to feed their blogs. All the people who scour the internet in search of material for websites, stuff they are going to mention in passing, and then move on.
All the marketing people are going to get is that 50% of the people who surf the web want to see dismemberments via locomotive accidents on YouTube. That's the "vector".
The point I'm trying to make is that only half the people on the internet are the passive surfers this technology would work with. The other half are people who create the content online via looking for content online. (and then there's a small percentage who actually create content, but they don't surf as much).
So, the entire concept to start with is screwed because it assumes that the web is TV.
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Ever consider seperating your business account from your personal one? Of course, Amazon could also incorporate aspects, profiles or whatever into individual accounts that would solve this problem. I think everyone encounters it in some form or another - whether you are buying gifts, changing jobs or changing as a person.
With that said, I don't think the central concept is screwed. If we can agree that the central concept is about effectively making suggestions to new things based on what we like, then th
Let's not forget... (Score:1)
The whole patent system is phuqued (Score:2)
This should not be patentable here or anywhere else.
No software should be patentable.
I wait to see the patent for chewing your food thoroughly before swallowing.
Cheers
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No need to wait long then (although this is for a device and not merely the method alone):
Patent 5924422 abstract:
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CANSPAM (Score:1)
Use Firefox Add-Ons; don't log into Yahoo! Google (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Use Firefox Add-Ons; don't log into Yahoo! Goog (Score:2)
I was just going to recommend the Redirect Remover extension for Firefox but it seems to have disappeared from the public site and into the sandbox.
Not too much to worry about (Score:2, Interesting)
So I'm a wanker (Score:2)
Not mine, they won't (Score:2)
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"If you patent it, they will buy." (Score:2)
Same with this. It's probabilistic, meaning is does statistics and guesses. It has more holes in it than I'd allow any of my research methods undergrads get away with on homework: besides multiple people using the same browser, how about people who
TrackMeNot (Score:2)
That's strange.... (Score:1)
Well, if they are granted patent.... (Score:2)
Next Mozilla Plugin? (Score:1)
random cookies to confuse these systems or hey
even create artificial patterns that might work
to your advantage.
(Yes sir you can see from my profile that I'm the
right person for testing driving the new Ferrari
just leave the keys in the mailbox)
When Did Society Decide... (Score:2)
1. If it's something I need frequently, I find a brand that I like (defined as: does what I need, or has properties that I
Yes, but... (Score:1)
Plugins! (Score:1)
Congratulations on further diluting your trademark (Score:1)
I'm sure they will be much happier when it becomes a generic term for spam, spyware, and identity theft instead, as in "that f'ing virus xeroxed all my personal data to the Russian Mafia and now my bank accounts are empty" or "those damn pill peddlers keep xeroxing me the same tired crap, trying to sell me Viagra".