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Apple Patents Bank Account Balance Snooping Tech
An anonymous reader writes: Apple's latest patent filings shows that the company is looking into displaying advertising based on your available bank balance. If Apple moves forward with this type of technology it would be a complete 360 on its previous direction to not monetize everything they know about customers. Tim Cook has even said multiple times that companies are targeting consumers on multiple fronts and that he's completely against using customer information in this manner and it's not the kind of company he wants Apple to be.
Seriously.
There are multiple reasons why one wants to obtain a patent, including denying competitors use.
From my perspective, there isn't anything truly innovative here. It's more like a business process that shouldn't be patentable. Banks already do some of this within their environments with targeted programs based on their customer's level of credit worthiness.
What's so different between the banks and Apple? Whereas banks only do it based on certain marketing programs, Apple would/could be doing it at a transaction level instead. That being said, they are very similar in concepts.
I think the bigger question is why can this be a patent?
From a high-level perspective, it's just a bunch of APIs that are integrated together to get the job done. Put in another way, if someone decides to integrate a set of APIs together, can that be patentable? Should we start to have a patent lawyer on speed-dial if we link different APIs together? Maybe we need to submit patent applications for our new API mashups before someone else or a corporation does it.
Why is it even idea even patentable? It invents nothing.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Big Brother is not the government but just a Harvard MBA.