

Apple acquires "identity pollution" patent aimed at fighting Big Brother - alister
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/apple-wants-to-protect-your-identity-by-cloning-you/258873/

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Alex3917
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.

~~~
cobralibre
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
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.

~~~
DanBC
Thats committed a criminal offence in the UK.

I'm assuming you're in the US. You need some sensible privacy laws.

~~~
culturestate
Which part? The questions themselves or the commingling of credit histories?

~~~
DanBC
Storing information insecurely, releasing someone else's data without their
permission, etc.

EDIT: Here's the official guidance from the regulator:
([http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/sector_guides/financ...](http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/sector_guides/finance.aspx))

([http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/topic_specific_guides/c...](http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_the_public/topic_specific_guides/credit.aspx))

Page 12 of this document talks about "associations"
([http://www.experian.co.uk/downloads/consumer/creditRefAgency...](http://www.experian.co.uk/downloads/consumer/creditRefAgencyExplained.pdf))
- credit reference agencies cannot use data about one person at an address to
rate a different person at that address, even if they have the same surname,
unless there is some financial link.

~~~
culturestate
Re: "associations," I doubt very much it's intentional; more likely a mixup in
the data.

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

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

~~~
frankydp
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.

~~~
batista
"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
They already do, and reserve the right to in their TOS. In regard to marketers
and advertisers.

------
dvhh
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.

------
nextstep
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.

~~~
DanBC
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.

------
JymmyZ
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.

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bigiain
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)?

~~~
slavak
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...

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

~~~
slavak
Being 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
The 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.

------
bjornsing
> 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.

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

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

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

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

~~~
pirateking
Not true. Safari and Chrome are both built on top of WebKit.

~~~
Karunamon
That's what I meant.

------
xorbyte
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.

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

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

