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Xeroxing Personal Data From Your Browsing History
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."
Point: quite a bit of spyware is perfectly legal. It's very clear in the EULA for the product it's strapped to, and it has a clear uninstaller (which breaks the program you wanted). Many people will use it anyway to use the program for free, or are just too clueless to notice.
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. Google Adsense can do the same trick, since it's a remotely loaded javascript. Why do you think Google Adsense ads are so damn targeted? They have your whole browsing (and probably email) history to work from.
In summary, it's not unprecedented, and it happens all the time. That being said, unless this was some innovation by Xerox labs in the 80s that never saw daylight, there's more prior art here than the Patent Office can shake a stick at.
I use Firefox's NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Between them both, I've blocked out all of the Yahoo!'s and Google's ad-tracking capabilities (and nearly all ads in general). Without cookies to track from one site to the next, I don't see how this will work unless every site does URL redirection. Also, don't log into Yahoo! or Google, then surf. They can record all of your search queries and tracking via your logged in cookie.
It's more complicated than that. This is a divisional application of another application which has issued as a patent. Furthermore, they filed another divisional application which also has been published.
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 if the elected claims are allowed, but may be presented in a new application which will get the benefit of the filing date of the parent application if filed before its issue or abandonment date. Any claims in a patent issuing from a divisional application are immune to an attack of double patenting over the claims of the parent patent if the divisional was filed in response to a requirement made by an examiner.
The disclosures of all the applications/patent here are all the same, since no new matter is added in the divisional application (theoretically they could do so, but such added matter would not be entitled to the filing date of the parent application); the differences among the applications is in what is claimed, and, as with any patent/application, the claims define what the invention is, not the title, abstract, etc. The terms used in the claims are, however, interpreted in light of the description in the specification.