Method and apparatus for selective disabling of tracking of click stream data
Number of patents in Portfolio can not be more than 2000
United States of America Patent
Stats
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Jul 14, 2009
Grant Date -
Mar 13, 2003
app pub date -
Sep 7, 2001
filing date -
Sep 7, 2001
priority date (Note) -
In Force
status (Latency Note)
Importance
Abstract
The invention is a method and apparatus for gathering click stream information from Web surfers while maintaining their privacy. In accordance with the invention, a Web site that collects click stream information provides an opportunity for visitors to choose not to have personal information gathered about them. If a person chooses not to have personal information gathered, the Web site continues to collect click stream information about the visitor's progress through the Web site as before by the use of cookies and/or URL rewriting, for instance, using Single Pixel technology, in which the client machines are made to send requests to a usage analyzer having cookies bearing the relevant click stream data. However, the cookies include an extra field called a privacy flag. If the visitor chooses not to have personal information gathered, the flag is set. Otherwise it is reset. The usage analyzer software checks the privacy flag in the cookie of each request it receives and, if the flag is set, replaces the data in any field of the corresponding log entry containing personal information with a default value. Accordingly, the Web site operator can continue to gather click stream information from visitors without collecting personal information.
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