Amazon Granted a Patent That Prevents In-Store Shoppers From Online Price Checking (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon's long been a go-to for people to online price compare while shopping at brick-and-mortars. Now, a new patent granted to the company could prevent people from doing just that inside Amazon's own stores. The patent, titled "Physical Store Online Shopping Control," details a mechanism where a retailer can intercept network requests like URLs and search terms that happen on its in-store Wi-Fi, then act upon them in various ways. The document details in great length how a retailer like Amazon would use this information to its benefit. If, for example, the retailer sees you're trying to access a competitor's website to price check an item, it could compare the requested content to what's offered in-store and then send price comparison information or a coupon to your browser instead. Or it could suggest a complementary item, or even block content outright. Amazon's patent also lets the retailer know your physical whereabouts, saying, "the location may be triangulated utilizing information received from a multitude of wireless access points." The retailer can then use this information to try and upsell you on items in your immediate area or direct a sales representative to your location.

Comments

Re:can they do it with https?

[funkman]

That's not how TLS works. At most you expose the hostname you connect to. All path parameters in the GET request are encrypted. And it doesnt matter if GET/POST/PUT.

Re: Yet another reason to never use in-store wifi

[thegreatbob]

Similar, but slightly different... they were manipulating their own website (or rather, had a separate intranet site) to cheat people out of their own online specials.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... http://gizmodo.com/241220/best...

Passive participle in headline

[tepples]

Amazon is not supposed to be able to grant patents. Only the USPTO does that in the USA.

You'd have a point if the headline began "Amazon Grants a Patent". But the use of the form "Granted" is a clue that Amazon is not the agent. To fit a headline under a publication's size limits, headline writers often follow rules like the following:

1. A headline is usually in the present tense: "USPTO Grants Patent to Amazon".
2. When the agent is obvious, such as only USPTO that ever grants patents, the sentence is flipped to passive voice: "Amazon Is Granted a Patent".
3. It's common to drop "is" and "are" from a passive main clause: "Amazon Granted a Patent".

Tendency 1 lets readers tell the difference between a passive main clause and an active one because only the passive one will have a passive participle. Most English verbs have a passive participle spelled the same as the past tense, but very few verbs (such as "come" and "run") have a passive participle identical to the present tense. Thus in this context, "Amazon Granted a Patent" means "Amazon [was] granted a patent [by the USPTO]".

Ambiguous grammar

[Comboman]

For the sake of brevity, headlines don't follow standard grammar rules, which creates ambiguity in this case. The headline could mean "Amazon [was] granted a patent" or it could also mean "Amazon granted a patent [to someone else]". The unambiguous way to state it in 4 words is "Patent granted to Amazon" which can only mean "[A] patent [was] granted to Amazon".