You may might have missed the commotion, but a few days ago our good friends in Redmond filed away this little patent, titled “Advertising services architecture.” This patent outlines a mechanism by which “targeted advertising” can be delivered using deep integration into the OS. The targeted part comes from analyzing your documents (basically anything on your hard drive), activities, and searches (even what’s on your screen at the moment).
This will be the mother of all spyware. Or perhaps the mother of all security breaches – I don’t want my operating system scanning my files and sending the juicy data back to some advertisement agency! If you think there was an uproar when AOL released all those search keywords, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Imagine what would happen if somehow a list of users’ context information was leaked, or someone cracked (assuming that it would be semi-secure in the first place) the mechanism for sending context data. Random people on the internet would know what sorts of things you are reading, writing, and looking at.
But this is just a framework, after all – Microsoft, integrating some aspects of the spyware game into the OS so that they can peddle their new spyware framework out to all those spyware makers and perhaps get a cut of the profits on the way down. Or maybe it’s the basis for some new “ad supported” version of Windows. Or how about a new way to combat Windows piracy? When you’re found to be running an “illegal” copy of Windows you suddenly get advertisements in every single program you run…
The possibilities go on. I sure hope that they’re joking around with this one. You know, July Fools and all?