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Amazon Seeks Personal Search History Patent
theodp writes "The USPTO has published Amazon.com's patent application for Persistently storing and serving event data, which describes a9.com's personal search history feature and lists a9.com CEO Udi Manber as an inventor. Interestingly, claim 48 describes a user interface that responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses. When filed back in 2003, Amazon asked the USPTO not to publish the application, but rescinded that request last May, presumably in anticipation of its filing for an international patent."
Interestingly, claim 48 describes a user interface that responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses.
Holy cow. I think they should change the patent claim from "Server architecture and methods for persistently storing and serving event data" to plain old "Evil".
responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses
Nice. Let's just hide the data from the person its associated with, but allow everyone else to see/use it. I wish ChoicePoint had this option.
combine this with amazons one-click patent, and you have THE most innovative company in the industry,
thank you, amazon, you are truly a benchmark in technology progress.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Everytime something good is about to happen there will be somebody to take that away from us why ? why ? why ?
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
The strange thing seems to be that there is an option to ask the USPTO not to publish a patent application. I appreciate that this is the same as not publishing a patent that has been granted, but since disclosure in exchange for temporary monopoly is the fundamental principle of patents, isn't having an unpublished procedure rather one-sided?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Another stupid patent when copyright should be invoked. I supose that the sooner all the dumbass patents get filed and approved the sooner the court system will have to deal with them, the sooner the whole patent process will get overhauled. But then I expected by now to have flying cars, 3D TV, and a trophy wife, so what do I know. [*SIGH*]
Too lazy to create a sig...
Rockie nWood, caveman unfrozen from the depths of the Ice mountain 8 years ago. He attended law school ever since and successfully got in flow with our society. Recently, he threatened to sue amazon.com due "prior art". He claims he was using his cave walls as a "personal history tracker", and demands huge payback from amazon.com for each year since he did that, until they filled the patent.
Thanks, Amazon, for showing the world why the U.S. patent system is the best. Especially for software related 'inventions' and 'innovations'.
I'm submitting this comment via the soon-to-be-patented 1-click 'submit' button. Which allows to 'submit' things, in only 1 click! Wow!
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Still not buying stuff from Amazon.com.
Once all evil in the world is patented, will there be any option but to be good? -- or will companies pay to license evil.
Question: Why would I use a service that was intentionally trying to deceive me ?
Answer: I wouldn't... bite my shiny metal ass Udi Manber..
alert ("You will forget what you have searched for and on the count of 3 you'll wake up. 1, 2, 3.");
Privacy is terrorism.
Avoid them as a plaug. Use Froogle if you have to, you'll always find a better price.
If they get it good things will happen. You'll know nobody else you do business with will be using these tactics. :-)
Unless they buy a license from Amazon. :-(
Does this mean that Amazon now should be considered to be spyware?
It still blows me away that they are giving patents out for shit like this.
All these patent applications read like the appallingly vague product specifications I'm supposed to work with. Just put the thing on company Word templates and I could probably get it approved before anyone even noticed.
Maybe I should submit patents on all the stupid things I get asked to implement...
I find it incredible that you can even request that the USPTO not publish the application: That should be an inviolate part of the bargain. If you want patent protection, you have to publish the details. Don't want to publish? Don't file the application.
When filed back in 2003, Amazon asked the USPTO not to publish the application, but rescinded that request last May, presumably in anticipation of its filing for an international patent."
Bloody twinks.
~kylu
(This is addressing only the privacy issues of deleting search histories, not the patent issues.)
*Of course* when I deleted my search history on A9, it only pretended to delete it by hiding it from me, but still providing it to other "clients of the event history server" (from the patent application). I mean, toolbar applications like the Google toolbar (appear to) have set the standard that you can delete your personally-identifiable search history to prevent privacy intrusions, but why should that prevent Amazon from profiting from that information to my detriment? Concerns like morally corrupt, ethically challenged, etc., only apply to flesh-based persons with human issues, not legal-based persons (corporations) with only money issues.
I love the new A9 search tools, but until their overt privacy policies correspond to their covert privacy policies, I'm going to be highly discriminating in when I use A9/Amazon to search for anything.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
You can't handle the truth.
Interestingly, claim 48 describes a user interface that responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses
So now you can patent changing bits in a database...
Why the hell does everything need to be patented?, would be great if things just could remain unpatented. Bits of News
That's a new one on me. All he was doing was saying "is there any way we can have them delete the search history and still keep it?". The engineers went off and probably said "um, let's add a display flag to search results." That's an appended query and a small change to the deletion code. That's not patentable!
That's all this is isn't it? They've patented a bit field to describe whether something is displayed or not. Prior art for that has been around for absolutely ages. Yet again a classic case of a small, simple and commonly used piece of programming being somehow the basis of a full patented business process. Absolutely bloody stupid!
There is an interesting possibility here; I don't know whether it's applicable in the US today, but certainly the position has merit under various European data protection legislation.
Under the UK's Data Protection Acts, for example, a company holding personal information about an individual can normally be required to provide all of that information to the individual for a nominal fee. Moreover, they would have certain obligations to fix incorrect information, handle the information in a reasonably secure way, etc.
The one glaring hole I've found with UK data protection legislation is that you can't forcibly remove information somebody has about you as long as the information is correct. In other words, the fact that I cancelled my order with a particular company and have no other dealings with them, and after reading about their data handling practices I don't trust them to keep my credit card number safe, does not automatically entitle me to have the card number removed from their database. We need only look at recent events reported right here on Slashdot to see what happens when an organisation with lots of personal information held under imperfect security gets compromised.
Perhaps this sort of deception, followed by a couple of spectacular failures of security and successful lawsuits by people who'd asked for the information to be deleted and later found that it wasn't, will be the catalyst for fixing data protection legislation in many places. All a company should be allowed to keep if you ask for your information to be deleted and they have no current reason to hold it is your identity and a flag that says you don't want to have your information kept on their system.
At present, you would have to jump through all kinds of hoops to demonstrate to the data protection officials that there wasn't a valid current reason to hold your data. And that's valid as in "the organisation's data protection entry mentions it", not valid as in "they actually need it to have an effective relationship with you"; just check all the blatantly unnecessary information that Transport for London has in its entry if you don't appreciate the difference. :-(
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Anyone got a link to the business 2.0 article that doesn't require a subscription?
Prior Art:
chmod 044
God these guys are getting desperate for stupid patents.
I stopped shopping at Amazon around 1999, when they "unilaterally changed" (permanently violated) their privacy policy to share my personal data "with anyone we damn well please", after I'd given it to them. I "updated" all my data to fakes, kept my account, and have tracked their agressive descent into personal copyright violation ever since. I use my "anonymized" account to shop there, then buy direct.
--
make install -not war
Wow. Another Non-Patent from the patent office. When are tech companies going to realize that they must compete in the market place of ideas rather than in the non-market place of patents?
I think the title should be changed to "Company patents web logs."
This is a bit hush hush. But I feel I strange need to tell the world. My employer is tossing in the paper work to patent eating soup with a spoon.
Because everyone knows the way to foster innovation is to stop everyone else from using yours once you've made the tiniest increment.
--
make install -not war
From this page...
I presume this searching feature of A9 would require cookies and that sort of thing, which is probably disabled by private browsing anyway, but I nevertheless find it a disturbing feature.
It obviously is meant for data-mining purposes, just in the same way they use your past purchases to make suggestions for books or thinks you would like to buy. It could serve well in a search engine environment if they can find out which links people chose. "People who selected links like you also selected these...".
But from a privacy standpoint, it is horrible. They shouldn't have that kind of information linked to an account in which you are not anonymous, and they have your name, address, and credit card number. Who would use a search engine like that for general purpose searches? They are trying to achieve Wal-Mart style data mining without regard for privacy issues. This is so awful, I wouldn't be surprised if many stopped using Amazon.com simply out of protest. Anyone know the popular alternatives to Amazon.com?
Oh my god! I just found prior art! /var/log/meggases
.bash_history file!
My
And wait! What's this? It's my
And what's this in my Go menu? Why it's my 'History' function. Way to go Mozilla! You infringed on a patent before it was even filed. Wow! What will they think of next?
Wait, wait, I forgot.
At the US Patent office they grant patents in spite of trivial things like gross obviousness, originality and indeed patentability itself.
I'm convinced at this point that the higher ups in the USPTO are getting backhanders from the patent lobby.
May the Maths Be with you!
I remember O'Reilly being pretty vocal about Amazon's abuse about four years ago. He shut up after Bezos made some noises about reform. They are obviously still up to their old tricks, so I have to wonder what happened to Tim's criticism.
The thing is that the patent examiners only search the database of issued and published patents. Which does not touch the stuff that was never patented. Also, a patent does not necessarily have to use much industry-standard language. You can make up your own terms for things. So searching might not even do that much good.
Patent examiners cannot afford the time to do extensive searching outside of their own database. The patent office is a velvet sweatshop and a revenue center for the Executive Branch....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Does than mean Microsoft should remove it's "personal search history" from IE ?
Yes, every site-name I'm typing into IE is stored in a History. That's some sort of "search" history.
Next to that, the name of *every* site I'm visiting (during my searching for information) is stored into my permanent (as long as I do not delete it) "temporary internet files" IDX-file. That's another sort of history.
It's too stupid that the patent can now used to describe/patent *what* get's done, not *how* it get's done.
How can they patent this? I have a BBS server on my Amiga that stores user history, and yes, you could remove something from the history, but the admin could still view it.
Video Production Support
My very brief search at EPIC didn't find this new issue at Amazon. My suggestion then is that we contact EPIC and alert them to this privacy issue:
Contact EPIC
EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.
EPIC publishes an award-winning e-mail and online newsletter on civil liberties in the information age - the EPIC Alert. We also publish reports and even books about privacy, open government, free speech, and other important topics related to civil liberties.
We have no clients, no customers, and no shareholders. We need your support.
Contact EPIC:
Electronic Privacy Information Center
1718 Connecticut Ave. N.W.
Suite 200
Washington, DC 20009
tel: +1 202 483 1140
fax: +1 202 483 1248
According to the USTPO's own site, in order to be patentable, an invention must be "unobvious" to a professional in the field of art.
The software inspectors are dumb as dogshit!
The one glaring hole I've found with UK data protection legislation is that you can't forcibly remove information somebody has about you as long as the information is correct.
Its not a hole, its there deliberately and its there in part to protect companies. Imagine for a second you could force a company to remove valid data about you - business relationship or not. Youve just gained the right as an individual to always have a perfect credit rating, as you can always get Experian etc to remove bad entries from your credit record.
A company also needs to know if it wants to deal with you or not - maybe youve been a bad customer in the past, IE returning a lot of products. Yes, you have the right to do that, but a company also has the right not to deal with you. If they couldnt store that information, you can continue on being a 'bad' customer because they can never know beyond that transaction.
Some companies do store more information than necessary, and this should be looked at, but I do not support the wholesale removal of information upon request.
I'm not suggesting you should be allowed to force removal of relevant information, just that it should be clear that you can require removal of personal information about yourself that a company has no current need to hold. Your examples would not fall into this category (although since the credit reference agencies appear to be exempt from the normal safeguards yet do a terrible job of maintaining accurate records and frequently damage innocent individuals as a result, I have little sympathy for that particular group and would be happy if OIC staff walked in and shook them all down tomorrow).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Powell's World of Books (powells.com) has an EXCELLENT technical selection, takes up it's own building down the street from the main store. Sure it's a little bit more $ for the book (but not much), but they are much nicer people...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Sorry to reply twice to the same post, but another significant point is that I have given no permission for any credit reference agency to hold any information about me in the first place.
Now, financial institutions are perfectly entitled to decline to offer credit to someone who doesn't have a credit record at the agency they use. As an individual you must accept the consequences if you don't wish to work within that system, even if that means you can't get a loan or mortgage.
However, whether the credit reference agency should be allowed to keep information at all without explicit consent from the individual is highly questionable. I believe that consent really should be explicit, with a genuine option not to agree. (A sign saying "we will pass your information to a credit reference agency" is not giving you an option!) If I never apply for credit -- not a bad policy in today's society -- why should such an organisation be entitled to keep all kinds of personal information about me without my consent, particularly when they seem to do such a bad job of maintaining their databases accurately? There is nothing two-way at that point; the only thing that can happen is for information to leak to my detriment.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Copyright merely will protect one implementation of it, how is that going to help? Who is going to get ahold of the source code?
Even then, once you have the source, you can make a derivative work my changing the source and copyright can be avoided again.
The claims end at 45. Go go slashdot editors!
Storing personal search histories on search engines had brief notoriety about five years ago, with numerous papers published about that time. It took Amazon three years to file a patent on other people's published idea? Boy, they are slow.
When filed back in 2003, Amazon asked the USPTO not to publish the application, but rescinded that request last May, presumably in anticipation of its filing for an international patent."
Kind of OT, but hoping someone can explain this to me? How can a patent be granted but not published? If I come up with a great idea, spend money on marketing, design, testing, etc, and later find out [insert corp here] has a unpublished patent, am I SOL?
claim 48 describes a user interface that responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses.
Does the Mac 'Trash Can' and/or Windows 'Recycle Bin' count a prior art?
"How can you call this trash prior art?"
The right to a perfect credit rating? No; more like the right to no credit rating, which is almost just as bad. I'm guessing the credit companies would respond to such requests by having all your accounts frozen in the process.
They could always add a status bit to the effect of "customer requested data removal" *after* your request was completed. Actually, that's almost more evil.
Wow, if that isn't proof the the PTO is broken, I don't know what is... How the hell is a patent supposed to be challenged if it's not published until its so-called "approval" (ie. rubber stamping) by the PTO??
AC comments get piped to
Is it just me, or is anybody else feeling a constant, nagging stress about (1) being spied on all the time, and (2) my helplessness in choosing not to do business or otherwise become involved with evil, without resorting to a full-on unabomber lifestyle? I'm serious, this gives me a headache every day. It is impossible to take part fully in modern life without financially rewarding some evil dink for perpetrating his evil on yourself or someone else.
Plus they won't sell your personal info to anyone they like. What other alternatives are out there, with a good Privacy Policy?
Maybe this is Amazon's way of asking to have people flood their servers with random searches in their name. As a result, the data would contain so much "noise" that amazon couldn't deduce anything from it.
Isn't the entire point of filing for a patent an exchange of exclusive use rights for the publication of the invention? ...or is it just about rewarding innovation by granting secret monopolies, now?
I have applications that I can submit as prior art from about 5 years ago.
One such system remembered each page that the user visited, and then build up visual cues to web developers of how people use the site, but also fed the results back into the user with a 'suggested link'
Each search result was saved, also, bugzilla allows you to save searches.
My SQLfoo app I wrote to query my db from a page stores all my past sql queries until I hit search.
My ex-ex-ex-browser (something called IE, I don't want to start an IE versus Lynx user war, I know IE is dying, I am not some FreeBSD hang on maniac - I let go...)
I am sure google stores this info (I am sure sure, I mean, check zeitgeist) Now Amazon always plays dirty with patents, I guess there is no charge in submitting prior art to a judge.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Why is that evil? Infact, why is ANY of it considered evil? It isnt - you want credit, then you need either a credit score or a really trusting creditor.
Youve just gained the right as an individual to always have a perfect credit rating, as you can always get Experian etc to remove bad entries from your credit record.
In that case, you wouldn't have a perfect credit rating -- you'd have no credit history, which most institutions consider as bad as a poor credit history.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Right you are!
it will face a validity attack when the assignee attempts to enforce it. Examiners at the USPTO have extremely tight deadlines and can only devote so much time to arguing whether or not this invention was anticipated or obvious. A validity attack by a team of corporate lawyers in the presence of a judge is a far more critical test.
That sounds so nice and easy - for a large corporation. However to a smaller startup, who cannot afford all the lawyer/court fees, it's practically impossible. So now "only the big companies can play" ... and do you think that another big company is going to come along and challenge this patent? No, because big companies seldom challenge patents, they rather collect large "patent portfolios" of their own, and then "cross-license" patents from one another when needed. This is why people "get uptight", and it strikes me as a perfectly valid reason. The patent system was created in order to foster innovation, but since it's an effective method for a few large companies to create unreasonable barriers to market entry for small startups, it stifles innovation more often than it fosters it.
Kick-me sign taped to a user's back.
that most of the reasons companies seek patents is because of the competition? IMHO, they don't apply for patents because they want to get hold of the market. They do it because they don't want others to get hold of it (take a look at the google autolinks story).
In other words, patents are like a weapon in an arena. You must get it before the other guy does.
Of course, if there were no weapons, things would be much better for all the competitors.
Sure, having no credit can be difficult, but you can build up a fair amount of credit during the seven years it takes derogatory credit history to expire from your credit report, or the five years you're paying your bills with postal money orders because you can't open a bank account because you're listed on ChexSystems.
For those who aren't familiar, ChexSystems is the agency to whom account-related naughtiness is reported by banks, generally when an account is closed in an "unsatisfactory" manner.
Banks generally consult the information maintained by Chex before opening accounts. If you're listed, you can generally kiss your chances of being able to open a bank account goodbye, no matter why you were listed. I've worked in banking, and I can tell you that no matter how hard the push for meeting sales goals the chances of getting someone to open an account when you're listed with Chex is basically nil.
I've seen many people with no credit, and many with bad credit. Can you support your assertion that "most institutions consider [no credit] as bad as a poor credit"?
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
I went to the application. There is a clause 48.
[0048] A Tag's "undisplayable" flag may be used, for example, to allow users to effectively remove events from their viewable event histories. For example, the web site system 30 may provide an application 38 and associated user interface through which users can view and search their respective event histories, and "delete" selected events from such histories. When a user deletes a particular event (such as particular search query submission or browse node access), the corresponding event object is marked by the event history server 32 as "undisplayable" to prevent the user from viewing the associated event, but remains accessible to clients of the event history server 32.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Enough said...
Pretty much the same. Most of our legal system is perfectly servicable and works well. Now if we're not supplying a "full set" but instead redoing computer and technology law, the situation is different. How about with very few exceptions, we make what is possible and what is legal the same? The Internet is not really like regular society; there is a technological and reasonable solution to everything.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Don't know if it counts... but I had a simple search history feature on my search engine back in Nov of 2003. Before A9 came out. The history was stored in a cookie on the users computer. The archive shows where the history was shown. http://web.archive.org/web/20031119184600/http://d hund.com/
Interestingly, claim 48 describes a user interface that responds to a user's request to "delete" his search history by rendering it "undisplayable" to him, but still leaving it accessible for other uses
We had that "feature" several years ago in a product we developed at a prior employer. Heck, Windows trashcan almost does the same thing, although I guess the user can still see his data after he deletes it.
...the test of obviousness is whether it would be obvious to a person skilled in the technical field of the invention, or, in specific legal terms, a person having ordinary skill in the art.