Google Patents "Scroogling" 135
theodp writes "In Microsoft's eyes, the idea of scanning Gmail so advertisers can bid on access to those suffering from breast cancer, bi-polar disorder, depression, and panic anxiety, deserves no kudos. The USPTO, on the other hand, feels it deserves a patent. GeekWire reports that Google has been awarded a patent on "Scroogling", aka its system and method for targeting information based on message content in a reply. Google takes some jabs at Microsoft in the diagrams accompanying the patent, including one implying that MS-Access and Excel files pose security risks, and another that suggests alternatives to Access."
I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Informative)
I miss Scroogle, even if the guy behind it was a little crazy. Hell, I'm a little crazy! Startpage just isn't the same (although, I generally use DuckDuckGo, and I encourage everyone to do so).
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Both Google and the USPTO are officially insane. Can anyone see where the patent wildly crosses the the line? Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy. This would be akin to the patents office granting the US postal service a patent for the ability to scan and read al mail that passes through it's service on the claim that buying a stamp means you agreed to all the terms and conditions of service of the US postal service.
There is always another party to that email, so at which point does the sender own the rights to privacy and at which point does the receiver take over that right or can it be legally implied that both own the right to that privacy and both must agreed to have it reamed prior to any company being allowed to do it.
Especially consider this on the reply, fuck Google, just because I send an email to a GMail address does absolutely not mean, I gave them the right to have my privacy reamed by the to their greedy and perverted little heart's content.
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are, and should be, about technical issues only, legality and ethics does not enter into the decision over whether something is patentable.
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are, and should be, about technical issues only
Well, I'd have to say this fails on those merits as well. I fail to see how "show an advertisement based on message content" is either inventive or non-obvious to an expert in the field.
Oh, but they have a "computing device" and a "cloud". APPROVED.
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I fail to see how "show an advertisement based on message content" is either inventive or non-obvious to an expert in the field.
Apparently you've not studied quantum mechanics. Some interpretation of quantum mechanics state that everything that can happen does. So, much like we have the EM field and Higgs field, etc. and interactions between them make up reality, there is an infinite number of Universes that could have emerged from the big bang with all sorts of different parameters for all sorts of fields. It's widely known that the standard model is a very good approximation, but still a bit incomplete.
Much like there are ef
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And who said that they patented exactly that?
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But I read the patent title!
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:4, Funny)
Things are looking up for my Automated Prisoner to Burger Converter.
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My personal code of conduct is not Stalin's personal code of conduct. I am right, he was wrong. So are you. Only mentally deranged people are moral relativists. That or libertarians but I repeat myself.
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I suppose it's easy to divide everything into black and white when you (in all likelihood, given your hilarious outlook) get your ethics/morality given to you in a book. If morality isn't relative, that means that there are billions of people out there who constantly do things that are against their moral compass. When you get down to it, morality is a concept that humanity has created, and it means whatever we choose it to mean. Sometimes we go with the group consensus, but often it's a personal thing. Wha
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"...about law and not ethics..."
The law is a compromise between ethics and the interests of the powerful.
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so, is Google's CFO the Chief Ferengi Officer? (Score:4, Interesting)
From a non-patent point of view, this email thing seriously creeps me out.
I wonder if the Google CFO's business card says "Chief Ferengi Officer".
*shrug* That is probably true for any large company.
So anyway... now that lavabit is gone, what is a good way to go for private email ?
Patents are, and should be, about technical issues only, legality and ethics does not enter into the decision over whether something is patentable.
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The email thing bothers me because I don't see that I have much control over it.
A side effect of my thinking about this is I end up being depressed about where things are going.
Just for fun, let me add an oprtion or two to your well-reasoned choices:
[_] Check this for a smart phone that
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Given all of that, if advertisements are unavoidable I'd prefer random advertisements that are totally untargeted to who I am and what I do. I know, I know, that is "unprofitable" for the service providers and merchants.
You really woud rather have a penis enlargement ad, nsfw banner or pyramid scheme ad instead of whatever it is you get? You know that no matter how good the offer they're showing you are not required to click, or spend money, on it, don't you?
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Patents are, and should be, about technical issues only, legality and ethics does not enter into the decision over whether something is patentable.
Ethics possibly not, but a patent has to be for a useful invention, and if what the patent enables me to do was illegal, then I could never legally do it, so the invention wouldn't be useful and couldn't be patented.
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I now have a patent on extracting money from people and banks by pointing guns at them.
The method is illegal in many jurisdictions, and I plan on obeying the law here.
But I will extract my licencing fees from all other robbers. First those who got caught, they are easy to find. Then I'll be able to pay my enforcers to collect from the rest . . .
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically, email is like sending postcards - it's complete;y open for anyone to read. (Although few do because who has the time to really read every single postcard sent through the mail? The NSA, perhaps).
Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).
If you wanted privacy, use encryption - it's one of the initial uses of PGP - for encrypting email!
And you're technically correct - in fact there's a class action over this by non-Google users finding that they're being profiled and tracked because they interact with GMail users and even worse, they aren't covered by any of Google's privacy policies because they never agreed to them.
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Funny)
If you wanted privacy, use encryption - it's one of the initial uses of PGP - for encrypting email!
Heh, if only the gubmint would let anyone open an unmolested secure email service.
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That's funny, but PGP was designed with the assumption that communications and email storage can easily be snooped on. It's an end-to-end scheme, and so is S/MIME. The security of both is as good as the encryption algorithm and your and your peers' procedures for key management and exchange.
If a government (to me, the U.S. government agencies are agents of a foreign state) wants the contents, they need to go after you, rather than installing blanket wiretaps at your service providers and silencing their sta
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Technically, email is like sending postcards - it's complete;y open for anyone to read. (Although few do because who has the time to really read every single postcard sent through the mail? The NSA, perhaps).
A postcard isn't open for anyone to read. It's only open to read for the very few people who touch it while in transit from the sender to me. And I'm quite sure there is some amount of legal protection. If you stood in front of my house waiting for the postman and asked him to let you read postcards to me, I'm quite sure that would be illegal.
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Does this also include Gmail users who also use other email addresses as well? Am I still bound to the TOS if I use a non-Gmail address to email a Gmail user?
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Recipient can freely show your mail to anyone else - unless he's your doctor/lawyer/other with contractual obligation to keep your conversations private. You generally have no say about his use of it.
If he wants to show it to Google per his contract with GMail - he can, and your only recourse is to tell him to stop using GMail.
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Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).
System Admins still have full access to all file-systems under their control so you have to hope that they have enough integrity not to abuse their privilege. it is possible for a rogue System Admin to write filters to extract compromising email however if they are caught doing this then they can face a prison sentence and/or a hefty fine.
Actually pretty much all outgoing and incoming business or corporate email is actually read by virus protection software no matter if the mail server runs a Microsoft, U
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Email has no technical privacy - it never has. Even in the beginning it was typically available to anyone who had access to the system it's on (back when people logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins would have free reign over the entire firesystem).
Back when people typically logged onto a shell account to retrieve their mail, sysadmins didn't even have to go to their homedir to snoop on them, because users had their own mbox file in the spool dir.
However, they didn't have free reign over the filesystem. They either had free rein across it, or they reigned over it. HTH.
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No.
The fact that email is sent _en clair_ over the wires is not an argument for it being open. The reason is simple: unlike a postcard where one need only look at it, to read someone's email somebody has to find it and open it up with a text viewer, which is a physical act - and this act is analogous to opening an envelope. Until it's opened all that's seen is a filename or header, which is akin to the address on the outside of an envelope.
Why this is so hard for so many to see is beyond me, unless it's
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Oh, and on those Google patents? They're bullshit. Now, thanks to the bright lights at the patent office, patented bullshit, just like so many of the others that are obvious, prior art, or "because computer|Internet|cloud".
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You may not realize this, but Microsoft does the same still, but to a lesser extent because their contextual ad scanning failed. So now they just do contextual ads based on subject.
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:4, Interesting)
Out of curiosity, what is your position on the non-advertising content suggestions mentioned in the patent? For example, if someone e-mails an address to a Gmail user, does it constitute reaming of the sender's privacy for Google's systems to recognize that it's an address and to offer the user a map?
What about other sorts of automated analysis not mentioned in the patent? For example, content analysis for automatic classification, such as the priority inbox feature which sorts e-mail into "important" and "everything else" categories, or the new inbox that optionally sorts e-mail into "primary", "social", "promotions", "updates" and "forums" categories, presented on different tabs. Is that reaming of the sender's privacy, too? The content analysis seems like it would be quite similar in procedure, just a different application. Probably a bit more personalized than the advertising analysis, actually.
While I'm at it, what about automated content analysis for spam filtering and virus detection? Is that also privacy reaming?
I'm curious where you draw the line, and on what basis. Personally, I don't see any sort of automated analysis whose results are presented only to the recipient of the e-mail as a breach of privacy of the sender, who sent the information to the recipient. I draw the line based on who sees the information, both original and the results of the analysis, and especially on what information made available to third parties can be tied to the people/accounts from which it originated or to which it is related. On that basis, I don't see any privacy issues with Gmail.
But others see things differently, so I'd like to understand what your criteria are.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, though the above represents only my personal opinion, not any sort of company policy statement. For that matter, I held the same opinion before I began working for Google, so I can safely say that my employment has not altered it.)
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Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Insightful)
when they analyze your data so that they can sell you to advertisers
I think the wording of this statement is misleading. It implies that some information about you is being sent to advertisers, which is not the case.
their method is to build a profile of you based on your communications that they can sell to advertisers
And again, this is not the case. Google doesn't sell user profiles to advertisers.
this is not simply some filtering system like a spam filter, it is a system to catalog every bit of information about you to be able to understand who you are, what you do, where you go, what interests you have and who you communicate with so they can show you more effective advertising.
I changed the bolded words in your statement, to make it more accurate. Yes, Google's intent is to understand you in some depth, in order to both provide you with better services, and to show you advertising that is relevant to your interests.
Of course, if you don't want targeted advertising from Google, you're free to opt out [google.com], even while still receiving the free services.
Does this corrected understanding of what Google does and doesn't do change anything for you? Based on the line that I described in my previous post (GP to this one), it makes all the difference to me. If that's not where you draw the line, I pose the same question to you that I posed to rtb61: Where do you draw the line? Is analysis for the purpose of targeted advertising different from analysis for spam filtering or automatic categorization, and, if so, why? Is it just a distaste for advertising driving your attitude, or is there actually some privacy consideration that I'm missing?
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Oh, one more comment: I should also mention in the interest of full disclosure that I find targeted advertising to be a good thing. I don't particularly like ads, and I'd rather not see them at all, but given that advertising is the model that pays for pretty much all of the web content I enjoy, since I have to see ads I'd much rather see ads about things that actually interest me.
This was driven home a couple of days ago when I was semi-forced to watch TV for a few hours, during the afternoon. One partic
Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this isn't a big deal. Your perception of the world is different than mine, so why wouldn't you visit a different internet than I do? But where do you draw the line? (right back at ya
Also, my interests are shaped based on what I see and read on the internet (as well as IRL of course), but if only pages/search results based on my current interests are ever presented, can I ever widen my horizon? I'm not a static set of properties.
Okay, so it probably isn't this bad yet, but I'm a little worried about where this is going.
Thanks in any case for your view on this.
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I think the wording of this statement is misleading. It implies that some information about you is being sent to advertisers, which is not the case.
But it is the case. The information is "this address passed the criteria for emails that you asked us for".
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Please note, that private information is only the information that can personally identify you. Unless you happen to live in a country/city that has you are the only person fitting that profile, you have no basis to claim that your private information is sold.
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Consider that you are targeting a DnD players in Boulder(CO), going through Google is the least efficient tools that you could use to get personal details about your target group.
Targeting any group larger than that is pretty much useless and you can't practically gather any valuable personal information.
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I don't see any sort of automated analysis whose results are presented only to the recipient of the e-mail as a breach of privacy of the sender, who sent the information to the recipient.
But the information is also shared with the NSA and law enforcement agencies. We know that already. It could (and likely will) be used for proactive punishment of thought crimes.
Moreover, what you call "content analysis" is also a technical term from the intersection of corpus linguistics and psychology. Just by analysing text you can obtain a complete and fairly accurate personality profile of a person. Try out for example LIWC [liwc.net] and see for yourself.
It's not harmless technology by any measure, it's a pretty
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Re:I miss Scroogle :( (Score:4, Insightful)
If your definition of "read" includes "being processed by a computer" then any email server that accepts an email from you must necessarily read your email. If your definition of "read" does not include "being processed by a computer", then Google is in fact not reading your email. Either way, you are completely misunderstanding what this story is about and what the privacy implications are.
In other words: name even a single way in which your privacy is being violated by there being relevant ads in your GMail or in someone else's GMail? The Google data center that decided which ad to show you already has your email, so Google is not getting any additional information from you when it selects or shows this ad to you. Advertisers don't get to see your email and they don't get to know who you are, so there is no information being leaked about you to third parties.
You might not like Google having your email in the first place when you send email to someone on GMail, but that is how email works. If you send an email to a server, that server has your email. That's what email is! In any case, since you aren't being shown ads when yous end email to GMail users, that concern would have absolutely nothing to do with being shown ads on GMail, which is what this Slashdot story is about.
What the hell is the problem?
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Whilst the GMail user has agreed to have the privacy reamed the other person or persons at the end of the email or those who replay to a GMail address have not, thus an extreme invasion of privacy.
If you send an email to gmail.com, gmail.com can read it. Is this really a big surprise in a technical forum? In fact, gmail.com must be able to read the email in order to deliver it to the right mailbox. It must be able to read the body of the email if you want it to perform spam detection. It's the same for pretty much every domain, as almost everyone uses some form of spam detection.
Only the naive or the wilfully ignorant could claim that they didn't expect Google to be able to read emails sent to their
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Listen up and listen up good. There are plenty of things I do that I prefer not to do and screw you if you think I just have to suck it up with out doing what ever I can do to change it and if I bloody wish, spend the rest of my life continuing to attempt to change it. I'll send email to a GMail address but make not mistake I will spend the rest of my life opposing the idea that they are entitled to read and analyse anything beyond the addressing. Personally I would like to see a new email encryption stand
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Listen up and listen up good. There are plenty of things I do that I prefer not to do and screw you if you think I just have to suck it up with out doing what ever I can do to change it and if I bloody wish, spend the rest of my life continuing to attempt to change it.
Yep. You give those windmills what for, Quixote.
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And you just learn to suck it on up h**%#r. To each their own, I know which I rather be.
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If you send me a letter, I am allowed to show it to anyone I want. I can even hire a service to open my mail, sort it, and toss the junk. Is that illegal? Should you be able to prevent me from doing that?
If you send an email to my gmail address, guess what happens? Guess who I authorized to read and sort MY mail, for the cost of some targeted ads?
Please stop trying to control what I can do with MY email that people sent to me. I always hear that the government is the one trying to take our rights, but t
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Somehow you bring to mind the kind of douche nozzles that thinks it's appropriate publish nude photo's that their ex-girlfriends sent them. Once it is in you grubby little mitts, does not mean you can do what ever the hell you fell like doing with it.
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This is actually a solid business idea, extending what Google does with email to Snail mail. Just think about how much this could improve targeted mail (junk mail) by sharing keywords in your mail with advertisers. All that would be needed is technology to scan through paper envelopes.
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what does a single word of what you say have any relevance to this article?
not fuck google, fuck you man. that effortpost troll was way slow.
Maybe you should look into what Microsoft does with your privacy and/or has done with scroogling, because both are ridiculous.
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Patents have nothing to do with morality or otherwise. Personally I would rather Google have this patent, then say, some patent troll company that will sell the patent to the highest bidder, say, some Chinese state run company.
Also I can't stand how much FUD is said about Gmail and its lack of "privacy". No HUMAN has ever read your email, ever, it doesn't happen. Google uses cold impersonal computers and algorithms to quickly scan text for keywords and then suggests ads that are relevant because they hav
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Sadly, we live in a world where implicit/click-through EULAs have been upheld in court.
Which means there's likely a clause which says "by using this service (which includes sending to our users) ..."
This will be true of pretty much any organization ... once the email hits their servers, they own that copy of it. Hell, if you sent me email at work
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Actually, the post office stores OCRed sender and receiver information. It's called a 'mail cover', and since 2001 it's stored for every letter indefinitely.
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Unfortunately DDG's results are pretty terrible. I find it pretty much unusable, specially because it tends to turn your search for a software package with a "common" name, to only turn out results from the common name (IE try to look for Lua and you get sites that use the Portuguese word for moon), whereas google will usually link to Lua's official site.
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DDG's problem seems to be that it only shows the top link for a given domain in the main search results. It's a terrible design, I'll admit.
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What I would like to see is a browser/scraper that sits on my own computer (not the cloud or a web server) so I can have complete control over it
This is really clever. The era of ethical computing services is yet upon its dawn. Find a way to monetize the idea and it just might make you rich. Remember, people said there was no (ethical) way to monetize search when google was getting started. They were (right) wrong!
Technically speaking, there's no reason all the end clients need to scape the web. The scraper could be completely centralized, but you'd run searches against a local database which is downloaded every couple days. All web searches c
The pages referenced in the summary (Score:5, Informative)
The one that suggests alternatives to Access: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/23/218/085/19.pdf [uspto.gov]
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Those show nothing of the sort. Wish someone would actually read the materials before writing the summary.
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Those show nothing of the sort. Wish someone would actually read the materials before writing the summary.
Well, the second image does show ads for Filemaker and Peoplesoft, sandwiched between ads for help with learning or using Access. The Filemaker ad specifically positions it as an alternative to Access, and it can be assumed that the Peoplesoft ad is also offering an alternative, though I don't really see Access and Peoplesoft as competitors.
The first image is an example e-mail that actually suggests that Excel and Access files are so valuable to the business that they should be protected from loss by gett
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Still giving out bad patents, I see. (Score:1)
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Do Evil ... On A Computer.
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uh-oh (Score:2)
sounds like Microsoft just got scroogled.
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Patent novelty? (Score:3)
Ohhh "determining reply content associated with the reply" If only three was some standard way to determine the content of an email. What is novel about this? Once you have a system to provide an ad based on keywords, what does it matter if you pull keywords from a reply, or from something else?
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This comes up every time a patent gets mentioned on Slashdot. They did not patent the concept of targeting ads based on content. They patented a particular method for doing that.
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They did not patent the concept of targeting ads based on content. They patented a particular method for doing that.
And their particular method is different from the other methods how? Reading the patent, about the only thing that is different is that they use the reply as the content.
The method involves using keywords from the content. Applying some sort of weighting that meets a threshold, and a few other things. How does this method differ from a method to introduce advertising based on other content?
Surely figuring out the reply isn't novel. Surely looking for keywords isn't novel. Surely weighting isn't novel. Th
Patent on 'Scroogling'? (Score:2)
I prefer Pi billion dollar spectrum bid (Score:2)
Poking at Microsoft is always fun, but when their competitors were doing huge, high pressure deals worth billions and Google bid $3.1415 billion (pi billion) that was the best, I think.
With their reputation for April Fool's day prank launches, launching Gmail on April fool's was good too.
So... (Score:2, Insightful)
It has come to this.
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Better than the one-click (Score:2)
Meta-Marketing for M$ brought to you by Slashdot. (Score:1)
The real reason for the patent. (Score:2)
Ridicules Article (Score:1)
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I'd rather... (Score:2)