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.'"

Comments

So Apple

[MitchDev]

has a patent for lying and fooling people?

Re:So Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

And they're terrorists! Who else would want to evade profiling?

Re:So Apple

[dc29A]

I claim prior art circa 1996. My real name is not Pig Benis. I don't live in Fucking, Austria neither.

Re:So Apple

[imagined.by]

Apple has a patent to fool bots that aggregate people's data.

Interesting how even this can be spun to something negative.

Re:So Apple

[Hognoxious]

has a patent for lying and fooling people?

Don't be silly. They're just claiming that they have.

Re:So Apple

[dav1dc]

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

Re:So Apple

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

We know who you are. Very funny alias, Mr Willy Ficken from Petting, Germany...

Re:So Apple

[daremonai]

So now can Apple sue every non real online ID?

APPLE, INC.. Plaintiff,

v.

HUGH JAZZ, MIKE HUNT, HOWIE FELTERSNATCH, LOU BITGOOD et al., Defendants.

Plaintiff Apple Inc., ("Apple") by and through its undersigned counsel, for its Complaint against Defendants Hugh Jazz, Mike Hunt, Howie Feltersnatch, Lou Bitgood et al. ("Ha Ha You're So Funny") alleges as follows:

Re:So Apple

[dsgrntlxmply]

Nope. Claim 1 is the sole independent claim, and begins with "A device-implemented method..."; no alternative embodiments are claimed there. All of the other claims are dependent upon claim 1. Infringement can only be asserted against what is delineated in the claims.

Humans are not (yet) devices, so direct human acts cannot infringe.

Makes Sense Now

[Anonymous Coward]

So yesterday, we see how Steve Jobs wanted all of Google's products to be integrated with Google+, presumably so that they could make things more relevant through social interactions. Then today comes the Apple patent for polluting a social profile and making that information useless. I guess his strategy of "going thermonuclear war" is still alive...

Re:Makes Sense Now

[localman57]

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.

I don't know if evil or good.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Makes me wonder if this is evil or good.

Evil because it's fucking with Google. This is squarely a jab to google's breadbasket. If WWDC wasn't a big "fuck you" to google, this certainly is.

Good because this is anonymity to the next level. Defeating snooping from big business to try to sell us shit we don't need.

Evil though because this idea should belong to everyone.

TBH, I'm surprised the EFF didn't figure this one out sooner.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[mcmonkey]

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?

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[twocows]

Because Google, while often treading the line on the "privacy" factor, does a lot of good things for the tech community and even the open source community.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[AHuxley]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html?_r=1
An easy read about what you can do with 50 trillion data “transactions” a year.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[EasyTarget]

While Google undoubtedly does some evil, the good they do outweighs it in my opinion.

I was reading their privacy/censorship report yesterday and thinking how nice it would be if Apple, FB, MS, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. all did the same.

Indeed, on the same day that Google was publicising and enumerating how much governments intrude on Privacy; the US government was refusing to say, even in broad numbers, how many US citizens enjoyed a NSA snoop session recently.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[jo_ham]

So does Apple. So do many companies. It doesn't give either Apple nor Google a free pass when they do something unpleasant though.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[wjousts]

Litter Brothers I have no idea about.

I'm going to wildly guess it was supposed to say little brothers, which I assume is rather than the big brother of one large organization (generally the government) monitoring people, you have lots of smaller organizations (Facebook, Google, numerous internet advertising networks) monitoring people.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[wjousts]

From the patent:

Concerns about the government and its knowledge about its citizenry is often referred to in a derogatory sense as actions of "Big Brother" who is omnipresent and gathering information to use to its advantage when needed. The electronic age has given rise to what is now known as thousands of "Little Brothers," who perform Internet surveillance by collecting information to form electronic profiles about a user not through human eyes or through the lens of a camera but through data collection. This form of Internet surveillance via data collection is often referred to as "dataveillance." In a sense, thousands of "Little Brothers" or automated programs can monitor virtually every action of users over the Internet. The data about a user can be accumulated and combined with other data about the user to form electronic profiles of the users.

litter brothers was a typo in the original patent that got copied to the summary.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

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.

Re:I don't know if evil or good.

[Runaway1956]

How do I apply for an NSA snoop session? Someone said that all I need do is post words like the following: (quiche? Really? WTF?)

Rewson, SAFE, Waihopai, INFOSEC, ASPIC, MI6, Information Security, SAI, Information Warfare, IW, IS, Privacy, Information Terrorism, Terrorism
Defensive Information, Defense Information Warfare, Offensive Information, Offensive Information Warfare, The Artful Dodger, NAIA, SAPM, ASU, ASTS,
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What is it good for

[DesertBlade]

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.

Prior Art: Art of War

[Bigby]

Wasn't there prior art in Sun Tzu's Art of War? This is only deception done on a network instead of a battlefield...

Prior Art.

[EasyTarget]

I've been doing this for 15 years now, ever since my first spam email lured me to my first spam site.
I own several domains and give different emails; faked whenever I don't care if I never hear from the admen again.
I invent (fictitious, but coherent) persona's for myself when answering marketeers dumb questions. I regularly complete 'Can we tediously interrupt you to gather marketing info' wonkery with entirely faked data. If I care about a website, or think a company is treating me properly, then I help them help me by being broadly honest, all others get systematically and deliberately misinformed.

My 2 point plan; which I heartily recommend:
1) Reward honesty with honesty,
2) Reward spin with spin.

And if any marketeers read this, hahaha, spin on it.

(PS: I know, from colleagues and friends, that I am not alone in doing this.)

Re:Prior art...?

[Lehk228]

That could be advanced with cooperation from VISA, rather than using numerically valid but nonsense numbers, use toxic numbers and names so VISA can track which processors these payments are posted through and crack some skulls

Re:Prior art...?

[Gordonjcp]

That's an interesting idea. You'd need a large corpus of toxic numbers, though, and you'd need to keep them secret from the phishers.

One trick you could use would be for the phishfarmer to collude with a bank to generate not just fake-but-valid credit card numbers but also a toxic CVV2 by using a bogus CVV2 encryption key on the generated "card number". A transaction processed with a generated number and a toxic CVV2 would be detectable by checking to see if an invalid CVV2 decrypted with one of the "phishfarm" keys - which would again need to be kept secret.