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Xeroxing Personal Data From Your Browsing History

Posted by samzenpus on from the xerox-knows dept.

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."

13 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. More lame patents by omeomi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wow, great, another patent covering something completely obvious, like analyzing my browser history to find out what sorts of things I might like.

    --
    ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
    1. Re:More lame patents by catbutt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Typically patents cover the particular way something is accomplished. For instance, if you invent an airplane and patent it, you are not patenting flying in general (which might be said to be an obvious idea), but the specifics of how you accomplished it. Someone else, who uses a different approach to fly, will not infringe your patent.

      Did you read the 20 claims before assuming their technique is obvious?

    2. Re:More lame patents by baryon351 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It sounds obvious, but also stupid.

      One reason marketing likes the whole age/sex/race/income thing, is that they can derive from that some possible information about what you might be interested in, in order to market to you. It's not perfect, as not all 16 year old males with wealthy parents will be interested in buying insanely expensive gaming systems, and not all 85 year old women on a pension will want to just email photos of family around, but it works better than guessing.

      So, what they're really after is what a specific person is interested in. What does a specific hypothetical user browse? what do they spend money on, what are they interested in, etc.

      And now in a world where it's so easy to get that specific information on hundreds of thousands people, they want to use that specific information to derive less reliable demographic statistics, in order to derive what a particular person might be interested in...

      Nuts.

    3. Re:More lame patents by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I like this kind of software patent. This isn't like most of these annoying software patents on elementary algorithms that any student of computer science would be expected to discover. This is a patent on an algorithm we would expect only to be discovered by assholes.

      What is unfortunate is the fact that asshole companies like Xerox (and its licensees) intend to engage in this particular form of assholish behavior in the first place. But a patent is basically an instrument for preventing people from doing things. If Xerox were granted this one by the PO, it would only play a positive role in the world. It would put Xerox in the position of being able to prevent other asshole companies from mining your browser history for personal data (at least in the fashion described) except under the terms they specify. Conceivably Xerox could prevent anyone from doing it at all simply by not granting licenses. If the EFF had filed this patent with those intentions, none of you would be complaining.

    4. Re:More lame patents by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Oh yes they would. Because what you just did is called rational thought and the Slashdot crowd is not capable of rational thought when it comes to patents.

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      How we know is more important than what we know.
    5. Re:More lame patents by martin-boundary · · Score: 2, Insightful
      If it's a mathematical algorithm, it should NOT be patentable. I have no objection to Xerox patenting the part where they pay a person to snoop through the web history and make a wild guess while swivelling left and right on their swivel chair (*)

      (*) that part wouldn't be very valuable but if they felt it was worth it :)

      Most mathematics is nontrivial and highly ingenious, but just because it's non-obvious that still doesn't mean it should be patentable. EVER.

  2. Remember, kids... by Atario · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...pay attention to those tracking cookies.

    --
    "A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
  3. Can you patent an illegal process? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The patent may well have merit but to be used it would have to break the law. Notwithstanding that governments may keep them for national security reasons, if the law in a country prevents a third party using or selling browsing habits for commercial purposes is it possible to take out a patent that presumes illegal behaviour? Such as a method of extracting money from a bank using a shotgun? Aren't they getting a little ahead of themselves in thier race to the bottom of corporatist fascism? Or is this very revealing patent application telling us that they consider buying the necessary laws to use it a mere formality?

    1. Re:Can you patent an illegal process? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Can you patent an illegal process?

      Why not?

      The law might change to make the process legal before the patent runs out. But you need to patent it right away to establish priority.

      Meanwhile you could sue everybody accused of breaking the law in your particular way.

      The police do your investigating and the prosecutor does the work of putting the information together for you, too. And the jailers keep the infringer in a known place for your process server. How convenient.

      --
      Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
    2. Re:Can you patent an illegal process? by asninn · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      That doesn't necessarily make it legal. If someone wants to install a piece of spyware and realises what he's doing, that's fine, of course, but for someone who's too clueless to notice, it's not nearly as clear. I might argue that there is no meeting of minds, and thus no contract (that's assuming we're in a jurisdiction where EULAs can be binding contracts at all). You might argue that it's his duty to read the contracts he's signing/accepting, so it's his own fault. I might argue that many EULAs are written / presented in a way that deliberately makes them hard to read, and that software manufacturers shouldn't get away with relying on people not reading things after they made it as difficult as possible to actually read them. And so on...

      I don't know what the solution is, but it's certainly not clear that spyware that's mentioned somewhere deep down in an obfuscated EULA and that will get installed without people realising (and that people would NOT install IF they knew it was there) is really legal.

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      butter the donkey
  4. Xerox must be doing worse than I thought by StringBlade · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They used to come up with new and innovative ideas such as, the Xerox copier, a graphical user interface using windows, and a host of other innovate technologies.
    Now they've reduced themselves to patent trolling in order to pander to marketing scum. Just, wow.

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    ...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
  5. Just an application... by sotweed · · Score: 2, Insightful

    .. not yet a patent. Look for it as a patent in 2-3 years. Maybe never.

  6. This assumes most people passively surf by tekrat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You know, I'm really sick of the whole "Guess your personal needs based on browsing habits". I get this enough from Amazon, recommending crap to me that I don't want, but that I sell to others.

    I run a website which sells stuff. Now, it may not be stuff I personally want, but obviously other people do. So, I go through Amazon looking for products to sell. Of course, the advantage is that Amazon recommends items to me that I might sell to the other people reading my site, so it works out, but still, Amazon has a screwed up image of what I want as an individual.

    Now imagine all these people who do searches online to find crap to feed their blogs. All the people who scour the internet in search of material for websites, stuff they are going to mention in passing, and then move on.

    All the marketing people are going to get is that 50% of the people who surf the web want to see dismemberments via locomotive accidents on YouTube. That's the "vector".

    The point I'm trying to make is that only half the people on the internet are the passive surfers this technology would work with. The other half are people who create the content online via looking for content online. (and then there's a small percentage who actually create content, but they don't surf as much).

    So, the entire concept to start with is screwed because it assumes that the web is TV.

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    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.