Google: Best Adaptation of a Novel To a Patent?

theodp writes "The USPTO's Thursday publication of Google's patent application for Inferring User Interests was nicely-timed, coinciding with what ZDNet called Google's privacy policy doomsday. The inventors include Google Sr. Staff Research Scientist Shumeet Baluja, the author of The Silicon Jungle, a cautionary tale of data mining's promise and peril, which Google's Vint Cerf found 'credible and scary.' No doubt some will feel the same about Beluja's patent filing, which lays out plans for mining 'user generated content, such as user interests, user blogs, postings by the user on her or other users' profiles (e.g., comments in a commentary section of a web page), a user's selection of hosted audio, images, and other files, and demographic information about the user, such as age, gender, address, etc.'"

Re:Google goes Stalking

[Peristaltic]

Look- you need to ditch the concept that Google adheres to "Do No Evil". That train left the station a while back- They are just another corporation looking towards the next quarterly earnings report and beholden to their investors. Period. They will do what they can get away with, and when they can't get away with it, they'll apologize for their "mistake".

Re:Sexism?

[Samantha Wright]

No, the female pronoun is frequently the default when the author is giving an example and is too lazy to say "he/she" or some permutation thereof. This replaces the former ubiquitous use of male pronouns amongst the sort of people who are committed to appearing as progressive as possible, and should be read as "trying too hard to impress feminists."

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[b4dc0d3r]

I was going to mod you up, then felt the need to explain why instead.

Shumeet Baluja is the author of a forthcoming book. The patent was filed November 7, 2011, presumably having been worked on for a while. The book was published in 2011, apparently mid-year but I didn't find a definite date. Baluja is not an author, but a CompSci PHD who wrote a book. And is employed by the patent owner, Google. Previously, he worked in data mining.

The novel was not adapted to a patent - both were the obvious result of Baluja's research and interests. The author is one of the inventors. It's the same thing in two forms. This is no different from "The Soul of a New Machine" which, although non-fiction, nonetheless surely had some parts over-dramatized. Take something you are working on, add fictional characters, and show how it can be used (or abused).

In other words, a fictionalized memoir. Ergo, Worst. Submission. Ever. Not news, barely qualifies as trivia.