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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 When filed back in 2003, Amazon asked the USPTO not to publish the application, but rescinded that request last May, presumably in anticipation of its filing for an international patent."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but since disclosure in exchange for temporary monopoly is the fundamental principle of patents, isn't having an unpublished procedure rather one-sided?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!
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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.
Does this mean that Amazon now should be considered to be spyware?
You can't handle the truth.
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.
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
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?
That is simply false. Searching for and applying non-patent literature is a matter of routine. Many supervisors require a list of relevant non-patent literature from their examiners regardless of whether or not it was used to reject claims.
Which does not touch the stuff that was never patented.
This also is simply false. In addition to a database of issued patents, there is also a database of published applications, including those which were eventually abandoned. In case you were referring to "stuff" for which an application was never submitted, that generally falls into two categories: stuff that isn't patentable under 35 USC 101 and stuff that was known and used before anybody thought about patenting it. The non-patentable stuff under 101 is often found in text books, journal papers, and other non-patent literature sources routinely used by the examiners. The other stuff is intrinsically more difficult - finding adequate disclosure of some commercial software that you've never heard of, with solid dates, is always going to be tough.
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.
Technically this is true, but 35 USC 112, second paragraph, does draw a line in this regard. Additionally, the USPTO separates the patent examiners into rather small groups (usually 8-15 examiners) in specific technologies. This helps deal with obfuscated applications. The 35 USC 112 and the USPTO also grant the examiners authority to declare an application as basically incomprehensible and full of terminology so different from that normally used in that technology that the application is summarily rejected. That is NOT fun for an agent/attorney, because you run the risk of losing the filing date, must supply a complete replacement application, run the risk of having the replacement rejected for containing new information (rather than just a replacement), and unless you're a partner in the law firm, it's really not that funny around the water cooler.
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....
With all due respect, you haven't convinced me that you're qualified to make these kinds of statements.
> challenged, etc., only apply to flesh-based
> persons with human issues, not legal-based
> persons (corporations) with only money issues.
Except if there are to be two standards for ethics and morality dependent on being flesh-based vs. legal-based entities, then certainly there should be clear distinctions and limits on person-hood and entitlement to constitutional protections - that is, corporations should not be granted unalienable rights that are granted by the constitution and bill of rights to human beings. Yet such constitutional rights are currently granted to corporations. Thus as corporations are granted "inalienable human rights" of the US Constitution, it is reasonable to insist that corporations be required to behave morally and ethically just as human citizens are required to by the letter and spirit of the laws and entitlements of the US.
The underlying flaw, though, is that only flesh-based entities are actually capable of either being affected by or fulfilling the duties that come with constitutional rights. By this we include specific duties like serving in national defense and jury duty, but also broader duties like simply obeying the law, or not impinging on the rights of other citizens without risk of concommitant punishment.
The problem is punishment for misdeeds of commission and omission with regard to citizen duties: corporations are granted rights with no effective or enforceable duties. As a human citizen I know that if I violate the law (and either directly or indirectly the US constitution) I can lose my citizen rights (jail) and means for enjoying my citizen rights (money). Corporation structure fundamentally insulates owners and owner-proxies (i.e. boards and executives) from legal liability from all but the most obvious and egregious criminal acts. Civil violations are punished against only the lifeless corporate shell itself. Even when attempts are made to punish, the corporation faces orders of magnitude milder impact, as a fine-to-revenue ratio. The checks and balances of citizenship exist for humans but not for corporations.
In additional to having the enforcement of duties defanged, the additional problem is that hierarchal organization inherently amplifies, and often distorts, the morality and ethics of those at the top. If a corporation's executives are simply morally and ethically weak, or worse, borderline sociopaths themselves (we all know of such a leader and such an organization) then the organization easily becomes a full-blown sociopathic entity, perversely with citizen constitutional rights but with no enforceable duties as citizens.
Individuals with such traits (e.g. Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, et al.) can be and are removed from impinging their evil on society in perpetuity, yet sociopathic corporations are not condemnable nor constrainable by the state or society for their sociopathic behavior. The worst-case scenario is a corporation might be broken-up or liquidated, but ultimately the humans leading the corporation can trivially walk away and start another corporation, effectively "reincarnating the evil" of the dead sociopath - even Charles Manson only gets one lifetime chance to inflict his sociopathology and then society locks him up and throws away the key, losing all future opportunities. While the individual must balance their own mortality and free will against evil in their heart, corporations have no mortality to be concerned with and the wizard behind the curtain are legally insulated from their deeds of control - this radically changes the checks and balances on citizenship and behavior as citizens.
An immortal corporation can not be jailed or effectively killed thus isn't affected by any of the downsides of punishments for violating laws derived from the constitution or other citizens' constitutional rights. Further a co
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.