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."

Comments

Re:More lame patents

[Brickwall]

Geez, anyone who read Peter Wright's "Spycatcher" - published 20 years ago - would realize that this patent is merely a specific implementation of the techniques Wright described in the book. In particular, he developed the idea of monitoring radio communications from the Russian embassy in London. All the transmissions were in code, so he and his colleagues had no idea of the content of the messages. However, Wright deduced that when the Russian "Resident" left the embassy, coded traffic between the embassy and his car would increase. By simply matching the comings and goings of various individuals from the embassy with increases and decreases in radio traffic volume, he and his team were able to pinpoint Russian intelligence agents promptly. (The whole book is a great read, by the way, and available at your local public library, I'm sure.)

In fact, I tried to get Nortel to implement something similar on their Meridian phone systems back in the early 90's. I thought that by tracking internal phone calls through "Call Detail Records" (CDR - which list the calling extension, called extension, date, time, and call duration), we could see patterns of calls between departments, and determine if repetitive patterns existed, such as many calls between sales and billing at specific times of the month, etc. I thought this might help identify operational issues, inefficiencies, etc. Of course, I was blown off.

Anyone want to give me a job?