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Google Seeks 'Do-No-Discoverable-Evil' Patent
theodp writes "E-mails and other communications between employees,' explains Google in a newly-published patent application for its Policy Violation Checker invention, 'can implicate potential violations of company policy or local, state or federal law that can go unchecked by attorneys or other legal personnel.' So how can you avoid those embarrassing Goldman Sachs and Enron e-mail gaffes? Use Google's 'methods and systems for identifying problematic phrases in an electronic document'! From the patent application: 'Documents may be used as evidence in court, administrative, or other proceedings. It is in a company's best interest to minimize or eliminate policy violations and/or situations that could give rise to legal liability. It is also often in a company's best interest to be able to Pack [?] these situations. Problematic phrases include, but are not limited to, phrases that present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual.' So, if you can't Do-No-Evil, at least you can Do-No-Discoverable-Evil!"
Right, so if you're doing something shady, don't use email to coordinate it.
Clippy: Do you want to really say that and be sued?
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It's the same as what happens when there is "open" government. As soom as there are laws and guidelines that governmental and departmental emails must be available for public perusal, suddenly all of the email channels are just filled with happy fluff and declarations of meeting times only and perhaps some birthday greetings. All matters of substance suddenly are done only by direct telephone contact or person-to-person meetings with no notes taken that could be used as evidence or found in discovery. Notice how few top level politicians directly use email, or if they do they tend to use private accounts to conduct gov't business even if that's technically and legally a no-no.
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So google is making a tool to warn people as they type that what they type could be "construed" as a bad statement. It's like Clippy popping up to tell you in a big brother voice "It's looks like you're making a sexually harassing statement or a statement that could put the company at fault. Do you really want to say that?"
Google Delete
If such a system was in use that resulted in deleted e-mails, it would almost certainly result in sanctions from a court, up to and including "death-knell" sanctions of summarily losing the case, when a lawsuit or criminal action was later filed. Discovery sanctions are getting more common from courts who are getting pissed at companies not preserving stuff that should have been preserved. Look at what happened to DISH Networks recently in the DOJ case against them.
If Google have that information, US government agencies have access to it as well, and will use it, even if you don't belong to any company. And definately would call evil any patent/company that basically forbids joking
For a second there I thought they were patenting not being evil as a business process or something and I thought "Damn! Guess I'm just going to have to keep being evil!" But they're really just trying to patent not being caught at it. Not getting caught is actually pretty easy as long as you don't have dumbasses in your company. So maybe Google should invent a technology to jettison the dumbasses in your company into the sun! Except, I suppose that would be pretty evil. Maybe I should patent that! It'd go nicely alongside the death ray patent...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm not really sure that this is even something they can patent? Isn't their prior art?
I seem to recall that the various companies (like banks) have programs in place that do stuff like automatically redact and prohibit things like emailing a document that contains a social security number. Using the above example of SSNs, I seem to recall that it would redact SSNs by changing 000-00-0000 to ***-**-**** or the likes?
I didn't read the patent application but examining emails and other documents for risky content that increase liability seems to have been long-since done and fairly run-of-the-mill considering that it is already in use and has been for some time.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Sounds like an automation of sarbox violations.
to take care of the guys in the Ministry who have been holding up this deal? That's just the way things are done over there, you know those Elbonians. A bunch of our other cycles have been drawn out and Larry and Sergei are concerned about the quarter, but if we get revenue recognition on this I think we can pull it out.
j/k
and I will find something in them to have him hanged.
The problem with constant surveillance and logging is that it doesn't matter what you say. It just takes coming to the attention of someone in power to get yourself fired, bankrupted, imprisoned or worse.
And that is why anonymity is the only defense against power. As long as the powerful people think they need to maintain a facade of "legitimacy" then they can't punish people at random. And that is why powerful interests are working so hard to remove the ability of individuals to remain anonymous.
The only way that true freedom will exist in the future is if there is a global communication network that isn't under the control of any government or corporation.
This sort of things already long gone. My company archives all email after 90days and deletes it after 1 year. Then they gave us a "chat client" for the majority of the company and an internal IRC channel for the IS department. So naturally everyone moved to those instead of email. Saving emails locally is punishable by termination and they have scripts that actively search for emails, archives and PST files and delete them.
My guess is, a lot of companies are doing this, and it's bad for Googles business model. So if they can get legal departments to trust that long term email storage isn't just a huge, decades long archive of casual conversations that can be subpenaed, taken out of context and generally used to sink any future case they may have to fight, then maybe they can get business to start using it again. The big problem with email is that courts have seemed to taken it as official correspondence or official policy if it's in an email rather than the casual conversation that it really is. Just because some bottom level manager says X policy is designed to rip people off does not mean that manager has any clue what they're talking about. Yes there are bad companies out there, but there are plenty of decent companies that have gotten caught up in huge legal battles over emails that certainly weren't nearly as big a deal as they were made out to be in court.
Using the above example of SSNs, I seem to recall that it would redact SSNs by changing 000-00-0000 to ***-**-**** or the likes?
Interestingly, this same thing works on Slashdot for your password. If you accidentally write your password to a comment, Slashcode will hide it.
My password is ******. See?
That's a good point you make. Google needs to keep people using email so that google can keep harvesting information out of the email contents, thus it's in google's best interest to keep email looking like a safe venue for communication. I had not thought of that particular aspect. I know that my mom is very circumspect about putting any health related things into email, even though her hospital is pushing her to use email to communicate with patients. She only wants to use it for confirming appointment times and changing appt times to ensure that she doesn't accidentally leak any HIPAA covered private patient health information.
Without reading the patent, how can you possibly make any claim to prior art? "Isn't the headline of this something like something else I read before? That's prior art!"
This is a typical "human-replaced-by-machine" type of patent, which has been struck down before.
The whole process is nothing more than a lookup of phrases and match against policy. This has been in existence for a long time in written (dead tree version) communication. Adding "database" or "computer" in your application does not make this something new. However, that detail seems to be at a loss at the USPTO.
... excuses to troll.
"Methods and systems for identifying problematic phrases in an electronic document, such as an e-mail, are disclosed. A context of an electronic document may be detected. A textual phrase entered by a user is captured. The textual phrase is compared against a database of phrases previously identified as being problematic phrases. If the textual phrase matches a phrase in the database, the user is alerted via an in-line notification, based on the detected context of the electronic document. "
Yep so its some crappy patent to detect phrases found problematic (e.g. Ghetto upsets Jewish people, "Taiwan upsets Chinese, "Palestine" upsets Israelis etc.) and warns the author of the problem. Big deal.
Obvious patent in common use, and should be denied.
Also business processes like this, should never have been allowed, US Joke of a Patent Office.
I'm sure Google will get their patent due to the pathetic state of our PTO, but the finance industry has had companies offering this exact service for at least ten years. There's a huge body of prior art.
My password is hunter2. See?
rewriting history since 2109
If the policy is evil, this would become the Do-No-Discoverable-Good patent, and we have enough of that already.
If someone creates a technology other people will find a way to overcome or circumvent it. This has been the way of humankind since the beginning. When are we going to learn that the fight (whether it be against terrorism, gun violence, or policy violations) is really happening between peoples' ears? The most effective weapon we have is culture and ideology.
Hey, that was my old password!
It's like Clippy popping up to tell you in a big brother voice "It's looks like you're making a sexually harassing statement or a statement that could put the company at fault. Do you really want to say that?"
More like: "It looks like you're about to make a statement that could potentially put the company at risk of liability. Please delete this message after sending it and dispose of all other evidence accordingly. Remember: It's safer to conduct this type of business face-to-face. Thank you and keep doing a great job!"
As businesses glow, the number of documents in a business rises exponentially
I work in a company that sells user-configurable deep inspection appliances. One of the first things shown on introductory course to the products was writing a fingerprint that searched for keywords on email traffic, and which was used to terminate a connection before such keywords would have reached the recipient. Although network intrusion prevention systems are mostly designed to detect computer security threats, every even minimally flexible system has this feature, and it has been demonstrated like this a million times. The patent system is patently rotten if Google is granted this patent, and they actually succeed in using it to limit competition.
Are you SURE you want to allow the use of "their" in this sentence, exposing you to on-line ridicule?
One day someone will sue Google and their lawyers will subpoena the entire archive of Google Glass videos shot at Mtn View HQ.
The source of that meme long pre-dates 4chan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_loss_prevention_software does this.
"I didn't read the patent application but"...
Slashdot should institute an automatic rejection of any post that contains this phrase. Usually what is follows is devoid of any value based on a misunderstanding of what the patent actually says.
Hey, I should patent that idea!
Making the bad guys stop using electronic communication is a positive thing. It makes it more difficult for those people to organize their evil schemes. On top of that, sometimes one of the mooks is going to screw up by putting something in email that he shouldn't have. Efforts to use private emails is good too, because it allows you to identify and punish the people who are trying to circumvent the system - previously, those people would have just used normal email with no issue. It's an all-around win for the people.
000-00-0000? That's *my* social security number!
Just look at Illinois and what former governor Blaggy did. If he didn't use the phone and email, and worked out the deal with Jesse Jackson Jr. in person while out fishing on a boat, during a golf outing, or at the table of campaign contributor's private dinner function, it's unlikely he would be in jail right now. There are plenty of other politicians are deserving of being in the same kind of spot, but they know enough not to leave an obvious record of the kind of deals that are "fucking golden!"
> Never talk when you can nod and never nod when you can wink and never write an
> e-mail, because it's death. You're giving prosecutors all the evidence we need.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I'm not really sure that this is even something they can patent? Isn't their prior art?
I seem to recall that the various companies (like banks) have programs in place that do stuff like automatically redact and prohibit things like emailing a document that contains a social security number. Using the above example of SSNs, I seem to recall that it would redact SSNs by changing 000-00-0000 to ***-**-**** or the likes?
I didn't read the patent application but examining emails and other documents for risky content that increase liability seems to have been long-since done and fairly run-of-the-mill considering that it is already in use and has been for some time.
You and the mods who pushed this to +5 insightful don't understand that prior art is about specifics, not "hey, didn't some guy in tennessee once do something kinda like part of that?"
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Equally, it can be used to not do it; how it is used depends on the users intent, it isn't inherent in the patented method. (Although "violations of company policy", called out in the patent as well as violations of the law, are most interesting for users who are trying to control what is done to align with policy and less useful -- actively harmful to the company, in fact -- if individual email users use it for concealment.)
Certainly, I know in many jobs I've had there would have been less cleanup for other people to do if staff that were innocently ignorant of details of company policy and/or controlling law had something reading their email that caught potential problems and pointed them in the right direction before they sent out emails to customers, contractors, etc.
That's the purpose (which isn't patentable even if it is novel), not the method (which is what is patented). The fact that the purpose is served by some existing solution doesn't mean that a new method to acheive the purpose isn't patentable.
I think the key new thing that most people are missing is the first phrase after "comprising" in claim 1: "detecting a context of the electronic document", and the fact that pretty much everything in the patent (including the identification of whether particular phrases are problematic) depends on the detected context. Its not simple blind phrase checking.
The patent system is patently rotten independently of that, but most of the arguments being used to dismiss the novelty of this invention in this thread appear to be missing the key point in the method.
Hunter2... did it work?
Man, I wouldn't be able to refer to components by their part numbers.
Based on the summary. Though I suppose the summary has been known to lie.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
As soom as there are laws and guidelines that governmental and departmental emails must be available for public perusal, suddenly all of the email channels are just filled with happy fluff and declarations of meeting times only and perhaps some birthday greetings. All matters of substance suddenly are done only by direct telephone contact or person-to-person meetings with no notes taken that could be used as evidence or found in discovery.
I had a boss that would intentionally do this - anything that could potentially get him in trouble with higher ups was relayed in person. It's highly annoying when you can't get project information or task details in writing.
#DeleteChrome
Wnt to know imiideately what a company is up too. Look for unusual database filters...
That's what the summary seemed to indicate. I was too lazy (I still am) to go read the application. At the very least the end result is something that has been done time and time again and I doubt that they can come up with any way of doing it that is novel and not obvious. Minimally, assuming any accuracy in the summary, there's prior art that would prevent this I'd imagine.
Seems strange to me... Google has been doing some odd things lately, I wonder what their grand scheme is. It used to be that they wanted to index all the information in the world. The obvious goal was then to monetize it. They seem to have done both well. So, what's next?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
******
Holy crap!!! It works. That's neat!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
LOL I noticed that right after posting it. I almost added a second post below it mentioning it and mentioning that /. should have an edit option for a short time after submitting your post. Thanks for going easy on me. ;)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Next thing you'll be expecting us to read the articles...
And, well, it would be pretty boring with just one or two posts per story.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I wonder if this system will automatically alert Google when something incriminating has been written, as well as by and to whom.
Being able to rat out and stop corruption sure would be nice, but letting the sender know you are keeping it a secret - that could be very profitable.
Could you elaborate? I'm quite willing to learn.
If there's prior art then what does it take to make it patentable? I've now taken a gander at the patent application and it doesn't appear to do anything different than systems described in the past. The only things novel that I see are "as the businesses glow" (glowing businesses is novel) and presenting the information in-line which seems obvious to me.
What specifics need to be changed? How much needs to be changed?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I have to assume that it isn't something you'd have enabled if that were the case. I can't think of any reason to use such an application either though I suppose if it could review forum posts before I submit them and correct my usage of their/there/they're it would have some value for me.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Seriously.
It's not the idea, it's the method. So I could patent a toaster that used human body heat to toast bread because even though toasters have been created, the method of using human body heat to toast bread is new and novel.
I'm not saying that this particular patent fits that description, but it would be patentable if, say, they're using a true AI to do the analysis or something.
I am all for it. I would like to see unencrypted and/or server-based communications go away completely.
Ah - I thought you were saying that this patent qualified too. Thank you for the description by the way.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Google's policy has always been "don't be evil". Not "do no evil". This is substantially different. It gives them a lot of leeway to do some evil stuff, and still be subjectively non-evil.
Yes, there are existing systems – but there is a ongoing arms race out there. Glanced at the patent and I can’t find anything special about it, but it was only a glance.
New technologies come out. Social Media is a major headache in my line of work because all written client communication must be kept for 7 years.
I know of consultants who claim their software will detect people who are likely to commit fraud based on automatic textual analyst. (looking for things that indicate financial stress, suggestions that people meet after work, changes in patters (like stop e-mailing certain people), etc.)
My company archives all email after 90days and deletes it after 1 year. Then they gave us a "chat client" for the majority of the company and an internal IRC channel for the IS department.
That sounds absolutely terrible for productivity, consistency, and internal accountability. Not being able to search for (or needing to meticulously save and organize mysefl) things like instructions, contacts, and details sent in past emails would seriously hinder my ability to do my job. I am very glad that I do not work for that kind of company.
(no sig)
I'd say, "Well find out." But, well, the USPTO seems to be willing to rubber stamp a bunch of crap and the trend doesn't seem to indicate that it will be improving.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Grammar Nazi are nothing... Have you worked with a Policy Nazi? Or some annoying twit who recites company policy or P.C. norms all the time?
At least Microsoft isn't doing it... We'd get Clippy the friendly policy helper who'd pop up just before we send each email with suggestions... "Can I help you rephrase that?" "Are you sure? HR will be notified..."
Me, I envision a cold war communist characterization -with a Russian accent: "Comrade, don't raise suspicions! Rethink the phrase..."
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Really? The GOOG will do new improved special context searching to give you legal bulletproofing, but their spellchecker isn't good enough to notice that "glow" isn't actually the right word in that context?
I work at a financial institution, and yes we already do this. Here's my suggestion. The USPTO should allow for individuals to submit examples (online) of prior art to nuke these bogus patents as soon as possible. I should patent this idea.
I'm not really sure that this is even something they can patent? Isn't their prior art?
I remember talking to a programmer once about the patent office. He said it's pretty predictable. "Think of the right thing to do. The patent office will do the opposite of that."
Its actually not that bad. Since you know the system, and you know email is not a reliable way to store your data (and honestly never should have been in the first place) you start storing things in proper ways. On an internal wiki or normal folders on the network. It's actually done a lot to improve how well we document things because everyone knows they'll not be able to dig up 3yr old emails to figure it out. Those emails may have been satisfactory for the individual keeping them but they did no good to anyone else. Also, when you're transferring this important information to the wiki or where-ever you've got time to think about it as a public piece of data now. We have a false sense that our email is private and no-one else will likely ever see it... then it ends up in court. When you have to transfer the important bits to public domain you then have time to decide what you actually want to make public and what you just want to let the archive delete.
See, this is why I use a bunch of asterisks as my password.
I'm not really sure that this is even something they can patent? Isn't their prior art?
... I didn't read the patent application...
Only on Slashdot would this be moderated as insightful.
Here's a real insight for you: when someone, such as Subby, paraphrases something to make it easier to understand, the result will be obvious by definition. Toyota's Prius hybrid is "like a Model T that can also use a battery", both of which are well known, so its planetary transmission is obvious, right? Or iRobot's packbot is "like a giant dog, but metal" so its radar terrain tracking and movement algorithms are obvious, right?
Paraphrasing is like lossy compression: it's purpose is to simplify and explain something by taking away in depth information. Making a conclusion based on that, without ever reading the original, is like listening to a 32 Kbps MP3 and saying you know that glockenspiels sound like trash can lids.
I can't wait for the first law suit that requires access to all company email for the last three years.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
Really? Let me try:
********
Wow!, That's great!
I've always been worried that someone would guess my ********!
Now, I know my ******** is completely safe! Even if I accidentally mention that my ******** is ********!
Slashcode is awesome!
Yes, that's part of what DLP (Data Loss Prevention) products and services do. Violations can be handled in alot of different ways: custom masks as you mention, quarantining the email and/or notifying a supervisor, bouncing the email with a request to clean up the violation before sending, even locking out the person who did the violation. These products also take aim at more malicious types of violations: like taking an Excel of customer socials and sending it to yourself in Gmail.
See, this is why I use a bunch of asterisks as my password.
That is f@&*);:? brilliant.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.