Apple acquires new user tracking target marketing patent

Apple Online Store“Apple is at it again. They’ve apparently acquired yet another target marketing patent and now that they’re rolling iAd out aggressively, there’s no turning back,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.

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“Some believe that iAd could eat up half the mobile ad market in the future while most think that Apple is really out to challenge Google,” Purcher reports. “More importantly perhaps is that actual paying customers of iAd’s services, like Nissan, have seen their ad time-traffic soar ten-fold. All the more reason why Apple is seeking to further fine-tune their target marketing capabilities – and in today’s patent report we’ll take you on a short trek through the mindset of the ad industry as it schemes to further burrow their tracking technology into Apple’s iOS devices like only Mad Men could.”

Apple’s patent features “techniques and supporting systems to track users and site visitors across multiple networks of mobile media properties as the users interact with the properties via mobile web, SMS, within mobile-device resident applications and conventional ‘wired’ content sites,” Purcher reports. “Various aspects of Apple’s invention facilitate the tracking and profiling of users of mobile devices and media. More specifically, the techniques described in the patent enable uniform user tracking across the major pillars of mobile media interaction–web, SMS, application usage and wired-to-mobile–using a network-resident cookie and hash matching.”

Read more in the full article, which includes patent application illustrations, here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lava_Head_UK” for the heads up.]

34 Comments

  1. I am not a number! I am a free man!

    I will not be tracked, categorized, micro-marketed to, cookied, or checked in, or followed.

    Apple: “You are number 6.”
    Me: “Who is number 1?”
    Apple: “That would be telling. Be seeing you!”

  2. Ads are a fact of life in a capitalist system.

    I would rather the ads were targeted to me, so they’d at least potentially be of interest.

    Don’t need snow shovel ads when you live in Phoenix, as MDN likes to say.

  3. I’d rather let Apple gather information about me than Google. Apple would only use it to target ads to make them more relevant to me. Google would use it to build a profile of me so it could track my next move and maybe even tell me what to do next (according to Schmidt).

  4. @Big Als MBP
    True. But I’d still rather it came from a model than a granny – lesser of evils, you understand ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />

  5. The government (at least in the USA) already tracks your phone and can even use the microphone (and the camera I think) to spy on you
    Personally if I had the choice between usg google and apple spying on me I would rather apple. Especially since apparently all they’ll do with it is change the adds on the screen

  6. If I’m correct, most cars now have a GPS system and recorder inside to keep track of your speed, braking etc that could be used by insurance companies in an accident. The police could use this info for whatever reason via a warrant.

    Now our phones are going to do the same. It’s creepy and big brother-like even if this is capitalism. That’s what shareholders and assholes like to push because it serves their interests. The fact is that it’s an invasion of our privacy over and over again and we better speak up now to show our distain for this type of actiity up front. What I want is an off switch to data collection techniques on my iPhone.

    Apple or not, I don’t want them collecting info on my activities so that they could pawn it off to their own iAd agency. Unless they subsidize my phone deeply, buzz off. We pay enough to Apple as it is. They can’t have it both ways.

  7. @Joe and Stephen
    What whack jobs you two are! So you think the government has the manpower to track every single one of the millions upon millions of cell phones and the phantom GPS device in our cars?
    What complete idiots you are!

  8. @Joe and Stephen
    It’s very simple: wrap your phone in aluminum foil. It just works! I haven’t tried the entire car yet, just the engine compartment where I think the GPS and black box are housed. Smirk!

  9. @ Excitable RicMac

    Talk about being retarded. New cars come with black boxes. When there’s an accident, the insurance and the police use the data from the black box to determine what state the car was in prior to the accident (e.g. speeding, too slow, brake problem etc).

    If you’re not aware of this, come out of your cave, Ricky. Do you where Ricky Mouse ears too? ha! Grow the Fk-Up.

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