The other day I made an eBay account, and in order to raise the maximum sale amount beyond $1000 eBay made me answer personal questions about my relatives, information that they had apparently found out from some commercial database, which I'm sure will then be fed back into that database. Not really sure how I feel about that.
I am quite surprised that anything that apple apply patent for automatically is for the greater good, instead being for its own agenda. I would not be surprised that the only application of this patent would be to spead more non-sense about its futur product.
Paranoid Linux used to do something similar. The concept was lots of seemingly real browsing traffic would be randomly generated through your computer, and this would add a significant amount of noise to the total web browser traffic to your machine.
What sort of identity thief cares about what products you buy, or what you search for? This is just a giant middle finger to Google, Facebook, and any other data-collection service.
I wonder if my proxy server that replaces cookies and referrers for Facebook Google & domains with "ads" in them - with random-but-plausible junk infringes this patent (or provides prior art against it)?
> One of the properties Apple won in a February acquisition of patents from Novell...<p>This story would have been interesting if Apple had actually acquired this specific patent. Now, not so much.
There seem to be quite a few knobs to tweak, and I'd be interested in seeing how such a service would work in iOS/OSX while minimizing user involvement. I suspect there would be certain tendency to still make oneself somewhat trackable if the user were to be given the possibility to tweak the Clone's parameters—much in the way that tweaking one's User Agent is quite likely going to severely lower privacy in terms of uniqueness.<p>On a tangential note, I'm always glad to see entities try and solve problems (here: user tracking, surveillance, and privacy violations) with strong technological solutions rather than conventions and policy. It's not that, say, DNT can't work, but solutions similar to the one at hand[^0] seem much stronger as guarantees.<p>Needless to say, I'd also be very interested in using this system, or a subset thereof. Hopefully, in a way that ensures not even Apple can track me ;)<p>[^0]: Acknowledging the fact that Apple themselves might not actually implement this, of course, and that Novell doesn't do much with it further.