Apple Wants to Protect Your Identity … by Cloning You
According to The Atlantic, Apple last February acquired several patent from Novell. Among them, one is quite interesting. Its aim is to protect privacy by creating a fog of fake identities, complete with real activity on the Internet.
As the patent itself says, the objective is to “make any data collection about a principal less valuable and less reliable.”
It’s quite an interesting acquisition. On one hand, Apple could use it to provide more privacy for its user. Apple’s UDID — an unique device identifier of all iOS devices up to the current generation — has been abused by advertisers to track and profile user behavior across multiple applications, often violating user privacy. Apple vowed to solve this issue in the next release of iOS.
It’s not just about being nice to your users. Mobile is the future of consumer computing. Undermining the effectiveness of independent mobile advertising networks would also boost the struggling iAd, who underperformed since it was introduced last year. Facing an antitrust probe, Apple could circumvent it by requiring that all tracking on its iOS devices be approved by the users: they could get approval as part of the iOS shrink wrap license (they already do for the many tracking activities they already do), while independent networks would have to bug the user explicitly about it. It fits quite nicely with the Do Not Track initiatives of all major browsers (some more reluctantly than others), which is going to be a big theme once the new IE comes out and focus attention on it.
Google and Facebook, along with a lot of smaller fishes, could be negatively affected if these kind of patents were to be implemented widely (as in all future iOS mobile devices). Their core revenue comes from how well they know their users.
