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Facebook Patents Privacy Social Networks The Internet Technology

Facebook Filed a Patent To Calculate Your Future Location (buzzfeednews.com) 104

Posted by BeauHD from the crystal-ball dept.
Facebook has filed several patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for technology that uses your location data to predict where you're going and when you're going to be offline. BuzzFeed News reports: A May 30, 2017, Facebook application titled "Offline Trajectories" describes a method to predict where you'll go next based on your location data. The technology described in the patent would calculate a "transition probability based at least in part on previously logged location data associated with a plurality of users who were at the current location." In other words, the technology could also use the data of other people you know, as well as that of strangers, to make predictions. If the company could predict when you are about to be in an offline area, Facebook content "may be prefetched so that the user may have access to content during the period where there is a lack of connectivity."

Another Facebook patent application titled "Location Prediction Using Wireless Signals on Online Social Networks" describes how tracking the strength of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, and near-field communication (NFC) signals could be used to estimate your current location, in order to anticipate where you will go next. This "background signal" information is used as an alternative to GPS because, as the patent describes, it may provide "the advantage of more accurately or precisely determining a geographic location of a user." The technology could learn the category of your current location (e.g., bar or gym), the time of your visit to the location, the hours that entity is open, and the popular hours of the entity.

Yet another Facebook patent application, "Predicting Locations and Movements of Users Based on Historical Locations for Users of an Online System," further details how location data from multiple people would be used to glean location and movement trends and to model location chains. According to the patent application, these could be used for a "variety of applications," including "advertising to users based on locations and for providing insights into the movements of users." The technology could even differentiate movement trends among people who live in a city and who are just visiting a city. A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement: "We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patent applications -- such as this one -- should not be taken as an indication of future plans."
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Facebook Filed a Patent To Calculate Your Future Location More

Facebook Filed a Patent To Calculate Your Future Location

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  • Nothing evil about that right assholes? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    KILL THE ZUCKERBERG!

  • Garbage in, Lawsuits Out (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    None of that sounds remotely patentable. Its sounds like the bad software patents of the 90's coming back to haunt us yet again. So.. its math (algorithms, not patentable material) run on a computer (again, adding 'on a computer' to something does not make it patentable) to guess the destination of someone based on where they have been (something an idiot with time and patience can do in person by following someone for a while) and where others with the same profile have gone next (hire a lot of idiots to w

  • Quantum Privacy (Score:5, Funny)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @03:38AM (#57784690)

    If we can convince them to use 256-bit values for the accelerometers, they can calculate our velocity to such exquisite precision that they'll no longer know where we are.

  • Dementia relief! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MancunianMaskMan ( 701642 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @04:17AM (#57784742)
    That's super useful! Because I'm of an age where I can't always remember where i'm going myself.

    Can I just look it up on Facebook now?

    • That made me smile. Predictions/recommendations based on location history and patterns really could be great for people with memory problems. A simple listing of frequently visited locations could be very helpful to some people (ex: Oh right! I was also going to stop by the store!).

    • People on a self discovery trip should try looking at home, maybe they're there.

    • Soon it will even be able to know what you went into that room for.

    • You'll have to sign up for the DementiaMention game from Zinga (in app purchases).

  • The Smart Kids (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BlueStrat ( 756137 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @04:23AM (#57784748)

    The smart kids have dropped FB and "smart" phones as well. Their internet is on one device in one room at home. They carry a "dumb" 3G "burner" phone with the battery removed and taped to the back, if they feel they need to carry a cell phone at all.

    They've realized that paying to have one's privacy, security, and freedom violated by both corporations and government in exchange for convenience and "cool" is a very, very bad deal.

    That's one of the reasons why they're the smart kids.

    Strat

    • Re:The Smart Kids (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @07:54AM (#57785192)

      The smarter ones never joined the cult of least privacy.

      The REALLY smart ones joined it and filled it with enough bullshit information to make every headhunter and employer WANT them because they look like they're the hottest shit in whatever field they want to be hired in.

      Many of the things that are evil can be turned around and used in your favor...

    • The smart kids have dropped FB and "smart" phones as well. Their internet is on one device in one room at home. They carry a "dumb" 3G "burner" phone with the battery removed and taped to the back, if they feel they need to carry a cell phone at all.

      They've realized that paying to have one's privacy, security, and freedom violated by both corporations and government in exchange for convenience and "cool" is a very, very bad deal.

      That's one of the reasons why they're the smart kids.

      Strat

      Where exactly are these two or three kids?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Pitawg ( 85077 )

        Oh, hi Facebook. What, is your patented method of determining their location a load of crap?

  • I assume that my Android phone does pretty much all of this already anyway. It doesn't feel like something that other popular apps haven't already done before, and it instead feels more like advertising basics that take a huge amount of data collection and processing to be effective. I'm often impressed by how appropriate/accurate suggestions/predictions can get with enough data points to analyze, and suggestions should improve drastically over time. I'm glad that such information seems to be used mostly fo

  • Patent pure mathematics? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greatpatton ( 1242300 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @04:55AM (#57784808)
    How can someone patent a way to calculate a probability, and transition matrix, etc? I mean even if you add the word machine learning. Gosh US patent system is completely broken...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Since the dawn of Africa, hunters have predicted where their prey will turn up next, Apex predators in the oceans. Going forward the Japs used DF to sink the Russian fleet. Nothing is new here. The Koreans used phones to set bus routes ages ago. cats with GPS collars have been studied. Repeat BS again for street cameras and ANR. There a bunch of people with team flags - do you think they are on the way to the stadium?

      The only unsolved problem is why traffic jams occur. To be worthy of innovation, they must

    • well I patent useing the letter E in on line math!

    • It should be rejected for the following reasons:

      1. Obvious use of the technology
      2. Is prior art based on it being done without a computer for decades, and "doing it with a computer" has been invalidated by SCOTUS

      It should be rejected out of hand.

  • I'm either going to at home or work, maybe the shop. There's really nowhere worth going to anywhere near me.

  • prior art? (Score:3)

    by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @06:39AM (#57785014) Homepage

    i think google is already doing similar things.
    i get notifications about things (like traffic mostly) where i might be going.
    yes, most of the time it because they are in my calendar, but not always, it appears to be 'learning' my daily/weekly routines.

    • You've hit the nail on the head though, this is an attempt to patent generating a calendar based on routine events. Or "a calendar" as it's already called.

  • What does that mean for me and my college roommate? He has a crush on the only cute girl in my econ class. I told him she leaves the Econ Building M-W-F at exactly 11:50, tweets about the class (leaking her position data) while walking across the quad one of two ways to the Student Union and orders a burrito for lunch. So the best way to "accidentally" meet her is to track which path she's using by the tweet location, walk out of the Electrical Engineering building at exactly 11:51 and head either north

  • Actually not anymore, because Google's walled garden and shitty webexperience made me switch back to calcurse and pen&paper. But before that, pretty much everything went into my google calendar.

  • tracking the strength of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, and near-field communication (NFC) signals could be used to estimate your current location, in order to anticipate where you will go next. This "background signal" information is used as an alternative to GPS because, as the patent describes, it may provide "the advantage of more accurately or precisely determining a geographic location of a user."

    This is an end-run around the laughable protection that turning off location services offers the user. Time to put my phone in a Faraday cage, dump it in a hole in the ground, and cover it with concrete.

  • Good luck directing ads to me there

  • For "Offline Trajectories" 20180352383-A1,

    It should cite "System and method for providing quality of service mapping" US8620339B2 while talks about doing that very thing (but with a different spin to it).

    https://patents.google.com/pat... [google.com]

    I'm not saying it invalidates the patent (I'm not a patent examiner) but it should at least be cited as a related patent.

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