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.

Comments

360 degrees is not what you think it is

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously.

Re:360 degrees is not what you think it is

[ShanghaiBill]

Companies patent stuff all the time, often as a defensive measure. Outrage should be reserved for what companies actually do. There is no indication that Apple is implementing this idea.

Also, the actual patent, does not mention your "bank account", only your available credit.

Re:360 degrees is not what you think it is

[Ol Olsoc]

I checked out the patent.....

Aaaaaaannnnd What the fuck?

So to put it mildly, the article is 100 percent Bullshit, a fucking lie, yet will be held as gospel truth by Apple haters.

This article needs taken down now, It is not factual, and the patent is for available credit, not bank account balance. there is a huie difference in both availability and ethics.

Thank you Shanghai Bill, for exposing the truth in the increasingly clickbaitish and not at all concerned with actual truth, Slashdot.

6 Weeks of shame on you Samzenpus. So were you lying, or just performing the worst fact checking since people made up shit ot get Pulitzer prizes?

Dogbert's Guide to Conversational Geometry

[Geoffrey.landis]

http://dilbert.com/strip/1992-...

How can this be a patent?

[SolarAxix]

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.

Re:If Apple owns the patent

[Wowsers]

Why is it even idea even patentable? It invents nothing.