It seems that Apple take pollution seriously when it comes to our environment, however, we do not know how true that is when it comes to polluting one’s personal profile!
This Tuesday, Apple was granted a patent that allows it to legally publish lies for the sake of privacy.
It seems that in this fast paced world of ours, everything we do can be tracked down through a simple search on one of the many social networks that we use. The patent includes a method to increase one’s privacy through the generation of fake online profiles. So if, let’s say, you were on “Big Brother” anytime soon, you can rest assure that the paparazzi will have a bit of hard time to document your genuine actions; the patent goes as far as generating fake actions on your behalf in fields that do not necessarily reflect your actual interests.
“Any network eavesdroppers, which are performing dataveillance on a principal, are polluted by the transactions that are in fact divergent from the true principal’s areas of interest,” the patent says. “In this manner, data collection is not prevented; rather, it is intentionally polluted so as to make any data collection about a principal less valuable and less reliable.”
Apple discovered the secret to crowd-pleasing; amplified privacy. Last year, Apple has implemented this enhanced privacy through the limitation of third-party data-collection that is meant for advertising. One concrete example is the “do-not-track” browser header in OS X Lion. Its Safari browser also defaults to blocking cookies from third-party websites, a feature Google cushioned as means of resolving conflicting user preferences.
Apple’s privacy approaches have also received improvement due to the controversy over its storage of exposed location data on the iPhone and of iOS developers’ use of the UID identifier as the key to date profiles of iPhone users.
The latest patent comes with an ironically apt typo; in the document it actually says “Litter Brothers” instead of “Little Brothers” in one of the sentences. The typo pertinently unveils what the patent actually does; means of polluting electronic profiling for the sake of combating invasive date collection.
While we do not know if Apple will ever implement this patent in any of its future products or not, however, from the looks of things and from our instincts to defend ourselves against invasive tracking, it is quite probable that such measures will no longer be looked at as absurd in the future.
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