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Apple Patents Polluting Facebook, Google Profiles
theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO granted Apple an odd patent on Techniques to Pollute Electronic Profiling, which presumably might concern the targeted ad revenue-hungry folks at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn (and their investors). The patent, apparently assigned to Apple from Novell, is designed to thwart 'dataveillance techniques from automated Litter Brothers,' including lawful targeted and aggressive marketing tactics. Creating cloned identities that are 'intentionally populated with divergent information [e,g., fake phone numbers, email accounts, credit or debit card accounts],' explains the patent, 'circumvents the reliability and usefulness of dataveillance used by network eavesdroppers and effectively provides greater privacy over the network to principals.'"
I don't think so. It sounds more like a MacroVision strategy. Come up with a scheme you want to carry out. Then envision all possible anti-scheme methods, and patent them when you patent your original scheme. That way no one can anti-scheme your scheme.
Evil because it's fucking with Google.
Why is fucking with Google evil?
And can someone please translate "dataveillance techniques from automated Litter Brothers" to English?
Apple has a patent to fool bots that aggregate people's data.
Interesting how even this can be spun to something negative.
Skimmed through the patent and all I can figure out is that our master profile stays the same, but you will have a bunch of fake ones. This does not give you a whole lot of privacy to the user since you are still tied to the master, but makes it harder for facebook/google to created targeted ads and make it harder for someone to find the real you. Unless you are actively using all these clones then Big Brother is going to know who you are. Next there will be a patent to filter out these clones.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
So does Apple. So do many companies. It doesn't give either Apple nor Google a free pass when they do something unpleasant though.
Does that mean every time someone fills in an online form using bullsh!t information; said person is now obliged to pay Apple a royalty?!?! :p
Google is a marketing company. That so many traditionally anti-marketing techies don't grasp this just means they are a very good marketing company.