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Apple acquires "identity pollution" patent aimed at fighting Big Brother
- jprobitaille 14y agoAimed at fighting Big Brother, or preventing others from implementing the method?
- wmf 14y agoSince Apple's users actually pay for their products, Apple is more motivated to protect privacy IMO.
- frankydp 14y agoI would argue that fact makes there user data more marketable and valuable to third parties. Which would provide the opposite motivation to most companies.
- batista 14y ago"most" is the key here. For all its faults, Apple is not some sleazy strapped for cash operation that neds to sell their customer data to marketers... Consider all the potential damage if that happened and was brought to light, and for what? 1/1000 their revenue?
- frankydp 14y agoThey already do, and reserve the right to in their TOS. In regard to marketers and advertisers.
- hnhg 14y agoI can't see how downvoting this comment is justifiable
- nextstep 14y agoParanoid Linux used to do something similar. The concept was lots of seemingly real browsing traffic would be randomly generated through your computer, and this would add a significant amount of noise to the total web browser traffic to your machine.
- DanBC 14y agoSee also "TrackMeNot" - (http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/) which is a browser extension to generate realistic fake traffic. I haven't seen any analysis of this extension, but I suspect it'd be trivially easy to split the fake traffic from the real traffic. I guess it has an annoyance factor if people have to store your traffic data.
- Alex3917 14y agoThe other day I made an eBay account, and in order to raise the maximum sale amount beyond $1000 eBay made me answer personal questions about my relatives, information that they had apparently found out from some commercial database, which I'm sure will then be fed back into that database. Not really sure how I feel about that.
- obituary_latte 14y agoSounds like you feel over $1000 about that. Yeah, creepy.
- dfc 14y agoI'm not sure why you were downvoted. I read your comment to mean "it seems that the loss of privacy due to divulging/verifying the information was worth less than $1,000 to you." This is a completely rational interpretation of this specific situation and the freemium/"your information is our product" business model.
- Alex3917 14y agoIt's actually not especially rational, because: - There's no way to know what the actual ramifications are. - There's no way to measure those against the other things that I'm already doing. I already do Google searches and watch YouTube videos on my own computer from my own WiFi network, and I also use a debit card, have an EZ Pass, use a cell phone, etc. As I'm sure do most people reading this. There's zero way for anyone to really know how our actions will effect us in the future. For all we know, opting out may be worse than opting in when it comes time to get insurance, get a loan, apply for a job, etc. It's certainly creepy when you're actually confronted with all the information that's floating around about you head on, but it's not at all clear what it all means or how it actually effects you. And believe me, I've read several books on privacy, Internet privacy specifically.
- dfc 14y agoI am really confused with your comment, in fact I am not really sure that you and I are talking about the same thing. Before we go any further down the rabbit hole lets make sure we are on the same page: - There's no way to know what the actual ramifications are. - There's no way to measure those against the other things that I'm already doing. Huh? What role do those two statements have to do with the discussion? I commented that the downvoted parent was a rational interpretation of the situation; you seem to be talking about the rationality of supplying the information to ebay. I did not comment on whether it was rational to supply the information to ebay because I have no concept of your utility schedule. I am not sure what books you have read about privacy that have not exposed you to an economic analysis of privacy; especially books on Internet privacy. Seriously? What books are you reading? There is a long history of economic analysis of privacy; Judge Posner published some seminal papers in the late 70s and early 80s [1][2]. A good place to do more research would be anyone of the ten or twelve proceedings from the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security [3] or one of the intro pages by the big professors in the field such as Acquisti[4], Anderson[5] or Ross[6]. Given that you "already do Google searches and watch YouTube videos on my own computer" Prof's Acquisti's introduction to the field seems prescient and especially apropos: "Behind a privacy intrusion there is often an economic trade-off. The reduction of the cost of storing and manipulating information has led organizations to capture increasing amounts of data about individual behavior. The hunger for customization and usability has led individuals to reveal more about themselves to other parties. New trade-offs have emerged in which privacy, economics, and technology are inextricably linked: individuals want to avoid the misuse of the information they pass along to others, but they also want to share enough information to achieve satisfactory interactions; organizations want to know more about the parties with which they interact, but they do not want to alienate them with policies deemed as intrusive. Is there a combination of economic incentives and technological solutions to privacy issues that is acceptable for the individual and beneficial to society? Is there a sweet spot that satisfies the interests of all parties? The papers, people, and conferences listed below try to address some of these issues." [1] Richard Posner. An economic theory of privacy. Regulation, 19-26, 1978. [2] Richard A. Posner. The economics of privacy. American Economic Review, 71 (2): 405- 409, 1981. [3] http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/past.html http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/past.html [4] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/economics-privacy.htm http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/economics-privacy.htm [5] http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon/ http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/infoecon/ [6] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/econsec.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/econsec.html
- JymmyZ 14y agoWhat sort of identity thief cares about what products you buy, or what you search for? This is just a giant middle finger to Google, Facebook, and any other data-collection service.
- saturdaysaint 14y agoThis is more about confounding certain advertising based companies than anything... I'm almost surprised Safari doesn't block ads by default already.
- gcb 14y agobecause safari requires work arounds from most sites to work 100%. remove ads, and the efort to suport that browser just die.
- Karunamon 14y agoSafari = Webkit. The same workarounds would have to be done for Chrome.
- pirateking 14y agoNot true. Safari and Chrome are both built on top of WebKit.
- Karunamon 14y agoThat's what I meant.
- JoeCortopassi 14y agoEvery browser has it's nuances that must be accounted for when developing. Safari wouldn't die for the same reason I.E. hasn't: it's bundled with a hugely popular OS
- bigiain 14y agoI wonder if my proxy server that replaces cookies and referrers for Facebook Google & domains with "ads" in them - with random-but-plausible junk infringes this patent (or provides prior art against it)?
- slavak 14y agoI'm pretty sure a product publicly available before the patent was registered can't legally be considered to be in violation of the patent...
- bbrtyth 14y agoNo, not legally, but they will sic their lawyers on you and bleed you dry anyway.
- slavak 14y agoBeing sued for something like this sounds like a perfectly good way to make some patent lawyer very famous and yourself very rich. Maybe I'm just naive, though.
- bbrtyth 14y agoThe problem is you will be up against a legal team funded by millions of dollars and they will get you stuck in red tape for years. I don't think a lawyer would take that on commission. And I don't know a lot about it, but I don't think counter-suits are very lucrative in patent law anyway.
- samstave 14y agoMore details on said proxy please.
- xorbyte 14y agoThere seem to be quite a few knobs to tweak, and I'd be interested in seeing how such a service would work in iOS/OSX while minimizing user involvement. I suspect there would be certain tendency to still make oneself somewhat trackable if the user were to be given the possibility to tweak the Clone's parameters—much in the way that tweaking one's User Agent is quite likely going to severely lower privacy in terms of uniqueness. On a tangential note, I'm always glad to see entities try and solve problems (here: user tracking, surveillance, and privacy violations) with strong technological solutions rather than conventions and policy. It's not that, say, DNT can't work, but solutions similar to the one at hand[^0] seem much stronger as guarantees. Needless to say, I'd also be very interested in using this system, or a subset thereof. Hopefully, in a way that ensures not even Apple can track me ;) [^0]: Acknowledging the fact that Apple themselves might not actually implement this, of course, and that Novell doesn't do much with it further.
- dvhh 14y agoI am quite surprised that anything that apple apply patent for automatically is for the greater good, instead being for its own agenda. I would not be surprised that the only application of this patent would be to spead more non-sense about its futur product.
- bjornsing 14y ago> One of the properties Apple won in a February acquisition of patents from Novell... This story would have been interesting if Apple had actually acquired this specific patent. Now, not so much.
- forgotAgain 14y agoThis patent would also prevent others from using the idea to stimy Apple's data collection efforts.
- falling 14y agoApple just wants your money, they don't need your data.