[IP] Re: Search Engines and ISPs: The Law is the Law?

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Peter Harkins <ph@malaprop.org>
Date: April 23, 2007 9:37:37 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Search Engines and ISPs: The Law is the Law?

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For IP.


Michael Zimmer wrote:
> The problem with the positioning of these kinds of products is that
> (a) it normalizes the collection of personal data, and (b) by seeing
> statements from Google like "You can also manage your web activity
> and remove items from your web history at any time," users are misled
> into thinking that activity they remove from their web history is
> actually being removed from Google's servers altogether (rather than
> just from this user interface to the data).

Funny you should mention it; Amazon's already attempted to patent that:

    A Tag's "undisplayable" flag may be used, for example, to allow
    users to effectively remove events from their viewable event
    histories. For example, the web site system 30 may provide an
    application 38 and associated user interface through which users  
can
    view and search their respective event histories, and "delete"
    selected events from such histories. When a user deletes a
    particular event (such as particular search query submission or
    browse node access), the corresponding event object is marked by  
the
    event history server 32 as "undisplayable" to prevent the user from
    viewing the associated event, but remains accessible to clients of
    the event history server 32.

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser? 
Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO% 
2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220050033803%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/ 
20050033803&RS=DN/20050033803


- --
Peter Harkins  -  http://push.cx  -  http://nearbygamers.com


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