Apple acquires "identity pollution" patent aimed at fighting Big Brother

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/apple-wants-to-protect-your-identity-by-cloning-you/258873/

by alister • 14 years ago

72 45 14 years ago

theatlantic.com

jprobitaille• 14 years ago

Aimed at fighting Big Brother, or preventing others from implementing the method?

wmf• 14 years ago

Since Apple's users actually pay for their products, Apple is more motivated to protect privacy IMO.

_wp3r2• 14 years ago

I would argue that fact makes there user data more marketable and valuable to third parties. Which would provide the opposite motivation to most companies.

nextstep• 14 years ago

Paranoid 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.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

See also "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.

Alex39174• 14 years ago

The 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• 14 years ago

Sounds like you feel over $1000 about that. Yeah, creepy.

dfc2• 14 years ago

I'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.

alister• 14 years ago

Really?! It's like a sneaky background check.

Can you clarify: Were you selling something for more than $1000 or buying something for more than $1000?

What were the questions exactly (not stating the personal data of course)? And how were you supposed to answer, i.e., did you have to type in names and addresses, or pick the answer from a multiple choice list, or what?

Alex39174• 14 years ago

I was selling something for over $1000. The questions were something like:

"Which of these cities did [Grandmother's name] own property in."

"Which of these people are related to you?"

The questions themselves are relatively innocuous, but the entire situation of where the information comes from and how my answers get used is rather disconcerting on multiple levels, especially since there really isn't enough information to make an intelligent decision.

cobralibre• 14 years ago

It's called knowledge-based authentication, a kind of identity proofing. This could conceivably be implemented such that your personally identifiable information stayed with the third party (who already has it) and never crossed eBay's path, though I don't know if that's the case here.

Credit agencies already have this information about you, so it's perhaps no surprise Equifax is the first result for "identity proofing" on Google.

_delirium• 14 years ago

I've had to do that before when applying for a credit card, but the information wasn't very accurate. They were asking a bunch of questions about my mortgage, which I've never had. Eventually I realized they had somehow gotten my parents' mortgage attached to my name (possibly because I was on one of their credit card accounts years ago?), and once I realized that, I was able to answer the questions correctly by asking my parents what to answer. But, not too impressed.

JymmyZ• 14 years ago

What 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• 14 years ago

This is more about confounding certain advertising based companies than anything... I'm almost surprised Safari doesn't block ads by default already.

gcb• 14 years ago

because safari requires work arounds from most sites to work 100%.

remove ads, and the efort to suport that browser just die.

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

Safari = Webkit. The same workarounds would have to be done for Chrome.

JoeCortopassi• 14 years ago

Every 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• 14 years ago

I 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)?

slavak2• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure a product publicly available before the patent was registered can't legally be considered to be in violation of the patent...

bbrtyth2• 14 years ago

No, not legally, but they will sic their lawyers on you and bleed you dry anyway.

samstave• 14 years ago

More details on said proxy please.

xorbyte• 14 years ago

There 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

This patent would also prevent others from using the idea to stimy Apple's data collection efforts.

falling• 14 years ago

Apple just wants your money, they don't need your data.

Apple acquires "identity pollution" patent aimed at fighting Big Brother

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