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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."
Because nobody could have ever thought of this before.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
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
...I must download more lesbian pr0n.
Get real. This is worthy of a patent? Just by the fact that you're reading this post you're most likely male, some college, etc.
...pay attention to those tracking cookies.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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?
Sheep farmer, Male, Scotland.
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.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
.. not yet a patent. Look for it as a patent in 2-3 years. Maybe never.
hhhmmm... that's weird. My data-mining algorithm produces: "Sheep farmer, Male, Australia". Well, it's not an exact science. :-)
They've also given name to a photocopy of my buttcheeks.
PC LOAD TP.
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.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
Well, they aren't trying to patent statistical analysis or tracking cookies in general, but they are grabbing for a lot. The claims don't look too impressive either. All the claims are too broad without a single super narrow claim that might just get accepted. Maybe the person who wrote the claims didn't understand the math. Double click, some of the old shopping sites, and similar companies must have had this well before the 11/2/2001 priority date. There is nothing in the claims or the application saying it only applies across domains. The examiner is probably going to reject every claim and love it because it won't take too long.
1. A machine-implemented method for extrapolating user profile information from user web page access patterns, comprising:
computing bias values for a plurality of web pages; ancient and general
assigning said bias values to the plurality of web pages; ancient and general
detecting at least a subset of said web pages accessed by a user having an unknown user profile attribute; ancient and general - tracking cookies?
combining said bias values of said subset of web pages to obtain a combination result; and ancient and "combining" is way general
assigning a selected user profile attribute to said user in response to said combination result indicating a positive bias of the selected user profile attribute; ancient
wherein computing said bias values for the plurality of web pages further comprises determining a fraction of users with the selected user profile attribute who visit a selected web page as measured over the plurality of web pages.hmmm, intersting limitation. Calculating a demoographic from the tracked pages. Pretty ancient too.
Eventually, this app is going to land on a junior associate's desk who will try to rescue it. In the long run, there's a decent chance that Xerox will get a patent on a very specific algorithm applied to limited data that is gathered in a few different ways. Hey, inventions like electrostatic duplication don't come along every day.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
Aggreed, it is stupid, if your purpose is actually to do marketting with it and sell more products. But my guess is that it's not how it'll get used.
Thing is, if you think about it... it fits just neatly in the eternal 3-way total war, whee the ad provider tries to shaft both the advertising company and the web master, and in most cases the two try to shaft the ad provider too. Tons of useless metrics exist just so the ad provider can tell some company "here's why you owe us a big pile of money for serving your ads", or so they can tell the web master "here's why we owe you a pittance."
(And just so it doesn't sound like the ad provider is the only scumbag, the whole dot-com bubble was based on the "hey, look, we can rip off the ad providers" idea. Ad rates in the beginning were based on sites which had one banner on the whole site. It tended to be somewhat targetted too, since if the web master chose just one, it tended to be somewhat related to what the site was about. And people used to even click on them occasionally. And they were worth decent money. Then some people discovered, basically, "woo, but if we put 10 ads per page, now we're owed gazillions of dollars." Whole companies went to IPO with that as their only business plan. But I digress)
The fact is, the _only_ real criterion of whether a marketting campaign was successful, is whether you sold more stuff as a result. Everything else, eyeballs, clicks, etc, is just smoke and mirrors. It's just some useless metrics that get gamed all the time.
E.g., it may sound like "clicks" is a relevant number, but it is only in a world where everyone clicked only because you got them equally interested in the product. Once you figure out other ways to fake it, comparing numbers of clicks becomes apples to oranges. And once you give someone a criterion like "number of clicks" to justify their salary, we're already seen the result: fake UI ads, punch the monkey ads, and outright redirects served as ads. It doesn't mean that those people became more interested in a company's product just because they got hijacked, but on a "look how many people we got to click your ads" statistic it looks the same.
So my take is that this is what it will be used like. Some ad provider will make up some scientific-sounding "how well we matched your ad to a target demographic" metric and use it to justify why you should pay a premium to advertise through them. Never mind that the demographic was a wild guess, and it actually lost information in the process... twice. It will look neatly in the marketting materials anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.