Slashdot Mirror
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 When filed back in 2003, Amazon asked the USPTO not to publish the application, but rescinded that request last May, presumably in anticipation of its filing for an international patent."
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
As long as there is the current broken patent law, they don't need to compete in the market place with new ideas, they simply need to compete in the non-market place of patents.
That's kind of the reason why big tech companies are doing everything within their considerable powers to lure the EU into the same trap the US has been lured into. I just hope that the European democratic institutions are strong enough to withstand this onslaught and I sure think this patent for Amazon should serve as a strong reminder why they should.
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!
The questions I have are: Why did they want the patent application unpublished? What did/do they have to hide? What are they scared of? (Obvious prior art?) Or are there valid reasons for a patent application to be non-published?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet;
A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell
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.
At what point do we have to just say "screw your laws, here are ours"? I think we're fast approaching that point, myself - but we haven't got a full set of our own laws yet.
Taking freedom of information as basic, what would the legal system look like?
While true, it would be less expensive to use an alternative methods, such as writing and publishing a "defensive publication". There are (non-peer-reviewed, pay-by-author) magazines that are specifically designed for this, AND read by patent officers (as in indexed for DBs they use for prior art searches). This is a relatively inexpensive way of establishing more prior art. Obviously there are cheaper methods too; it just depends on how certain one wants to be that USPTO is aware of such prior art.
I have seen my employer do this for things they don't think are worth patenting (outside core interests of the company), but are interesting and novel enough that lesser investment is warranted as a protective measure. Or at least that's my interpretation -- lawyers seldom comment on how and why they choose one method over another (that they do defensive publication I know for a fact, just not reasoning).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes