I find this staggering. It's a patent application by Microsoft for a mechanism to sell third-party targeted advertising to you, delivering it through the operating system. "Okay," you say. "What's the big deal?"
I'll summarize the "big deal' part.
The process uses tags of user data that can be included in a profile database and/or extracted on demand to trigger a targeted advertisement on the users computer.
The data set may include (quoted directly from section [0032] in the link below. Italics added by me):
"a text string, a universal record locator (URL), e-mail
content, or profile indicator, among others. In some cases, processing the tag may include refining or supplementing tag data at block 410, in some cases using another source. The other source may be any number of locally available data including, but not limited to,
user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, computer status messages (e.g. a low memory status or low printer ink), previous tag data stored in the profile manager database 309, and the framework utilities 310."
In other words, Microsoft will read your email, read your documents, read your URL record, read what music and podcasts and anything else they choose to ready on your computer so targeted advertising matching your "interests" can be sold by Microsoft and delivered to your computer via the OS.
Call me crazy, but I don't like it. I have to pay for an OS so Microsoft can use it to sell ads to me? I think they should pay me. The question is, if you don't like it either, what are you going to do about it? You can't fight a monopoly, so get ready to suck it up, losers!
Here is the patent application for those of you who think I'm making this up:
Link >> Added: I forgot to mention that Microsoft claims this is a benefit to you, the consumer. I can hardly contain my joy.
