Amazon fills patent to track Bitcoin users

[cellard]

Looks like Jeff Bezos wants to get involved in Bitcoin... the wrong way:

Amazon filed a patent to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions and sell the data to law enforcement

One example is a data stream that publishes or includes global bitcoin transactions (or any crypto currency transaction). These transactions are completely visible to each participant in the network. The raw transaction data may have little meaning to a customer unless the customer has a way to correlate various elements of the stream with other useful data. For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream. A group of telecommunications providers may subscribe downstream to the combined data stream and be able to correlate the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the transactions to countries of origin. Government agencies may be able to subscribe downstream and correlate tax transaction data to help identify transaction participants.

Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.

[bitart]

Looks like Jeff Bezos wants to get involved in Bitcoin... the wrong way:

Amazon filed a patent to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions and sell the data to law enforcement

One example is a data stream that publishes or includes global bitcoin transactions (or any crypto currency transaction). These transactions are completely visible to each participant in the network. The raw transaction data may have little meaning to a customer unless the customer has a way to correlate various elements of the stream with other useful data. For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream. A group of telecommunications providers may subscribe downstream to the combined data stream and be able to correlate the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the transactions to countries of origin. Government agencies may be able to subscribe downstream and correlate tax transaction data to help identify transaction participants.

Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.

This is a very interesting technique of hedging against the price volatility...
They accept bitcoin, they will make some money from bitcoin users' purchases, but they will make much more money from selling the data of the bitcoin transactions and the personal data of the related users.
This is a kind of problem with online shopping, you have to give out your personal data (real name, shipping address) to get the things you buy... and Amazon knows this, and knows that this data is more valuable than the other stuff they sell...

[o_e_l_e_o]

I'm curious as to how this will work in practice. Sure, Amazon could link my real data to a bitcoin address if I bought physical goods from them and paid in bitcoin, but why would I ever need to use that address again? With the existence of bitcoin mixers and coins like monero, I can easily anonymise some coins and send them to Amazon from an address I'll never use again. All they could link me to is that one single payment.

However, I suspect the people that actually care about privacy won't use Amazon anyway, and the people that don't care that much about privacy have already had all their private data leaked by Facebook.

[hatshepsut93]

I think the transparency of Bitcoin's blockchain is one of the factors why governments might be interested in it and why they haven't banned it right away - they might monitor transactions while (some) users think that they are anonymous. But Bitcoin's ecosystem always tried to solve this problem with solutions like mixers and potential additions to Bitcoin's protocol like Schnorr signatures, and if the situation with privacy will improve, maybe we'll start hearing more hostility from governments and banks than now.

[5ensei]

It's a good idea to help it to go mainstream and gain more trust from the public, but amazon would do better if they just created their own coin instead. If anyone wants privacy there are plenty of other good anonymous coins to choose from.

[ManaMan]

Well there's nothing stopping them from developing advanced tools that will track where is money moving to and from. The biggest lack of bitcoin is that transactions are transparent, it is okay for them to be transparent as then we know whats happening, but when companies/ governments start to track users then it can become the problem. Although I am sure that some secret agencies are collecting such data for long time now. The biggest problem is that then you have to use things like mixers where you have to relay on 3rd party.

It's a good idea to help it to go mainstream and gain more trust from the public, but amazon would do better if they just created their own coin instead. If anyone wants privacy there are plenty of other good anonymous coins to choose from.

Why create their own coin, you mean an ICO to milk other people more? Anyways if they ever accept bitcoin then price will soar for sure, I think that they at least know how huge impact they can have on the space.

[mindrust]

You can always move your coins to a different address and if someone asks, you can tell "no they ain't mine no more, i sent them to somebody else." Nobody can know it. That's beyond retarded.

Do they realize one can always use 2 different addresses. One for daily shopping, one for hidden hodl stash. So what's the point? Also Wtf is there to patent? They should spend their time and money to improve their distribution network instead of indexing crypto users.

Do amazon even accept crypto payments? (as far as I know they don't, yet. fix me if i'm wrong) Is this what we are looking at? Are they about to accept crypto?

[CrypticGambit]

This is very bad PR for them. First they accept bitcoin now they want to fight against it? It makes no sense to me... I hope that we will see some soft fork that will make bitcoin transactions more anonymous. Crypto was created to avoid goverment control, but people now just want regulation. I don't get it!

[merchantofzeny]

Greed know no limits. Not content with selling stuff, now they want to sell people's data, people who didn't agree at that. This couldn't have come at a better time as Zuckerberg is being investigated in Congress. I hope this give Bezos the negative publicity as Zucc.

You can always move your coins to a different address and if someone asks, you can tell "no they ain't mine no more, i sent them to somebody else." Nobody can know it. That's beyond retarded.

Do they realize one can always use 2 different addresses. One for daily shopping, one for hidden hodl stash. So what's the point? Also Wtf is there to patent? They should spend their time and money to improve their distribution network instead of indexing crypto users.

Do amazon even accept crypto payments? (as far as I know they don't, yet. fix me if i'm wrong) Is this what we are looking at? Are they about to accept crypto?

Can't the regular users already track these anyway? More like they'll just scour the records and compile the data and sell it.

[IsuruMaduranga]

Some centralized f*cking company want to kill the decentralization.
Decentralized currencies and DApps could and their very existence could be a real threat to those centralized organizations.

Dapps and crypto based projects are being developed to compete with centralized applications.
As a example Effect.ai(A NEO based project) is developing a M-Turk which is better than Amazon M-Turk.

Decentralization will be a real trend with time which could be a real threat to centralized organizations.
So this news is no surprise to me.

Shame on you Amazon.

[hase0278]

Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.

They can only sell their transaction logs and information of their customers who uses it, but IMO they would not succeed in tracking everything since it is very easy to create a new wallet to use when transacting with amazon. The only problem is the user's address and other personal information that they can sell. I hope they wouldn't resort to it.

[ldah94]

It is a way of putting decentralized currencies at a disadvantage and it is sad that amazon participates in this loss of prestige, although it could also be negative for them because many of their users who use cryptocurrencies will stop using their services and their demand will go down, let's see how this is unleashed to future

[cizatext]

Well that will be difficult to achieved due to the fact that bitcoin is decentralized and the blockchain technology is built in a way that it is very impossible to be trace that is what make bitcoin unique and free from all forms of control.

[bettercrypto]

Looks like Jeff Bezos wants to get involved in Bitcoin... the wrong way:

Amazon filed a patent to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions and sell the data to law enforcement

One example is a data stream that publishes or includes global bitcoin transactions (or any crypto currency transaction). These transactions are completely visible to each participant in the network. The raw transaction data may have little meaning to a customer unless the customer has a way to correlate various elements of the stream with other useful data. For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream. A group of telecommunications providers may subscribe downstream to the combined data stream and be able to correlate the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the transactions to countries of origin. Government agencies may be able to subscribe downstream and correlate tax transaction data to help identify transaction participants.

Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.

This is a very interesting technique of hedging against the price volatility...
They accept bitcoin, they will make some money from bitcoin users' purchases, but they will make much more money from selling the data of the bitcoin transactions and the personal data of the related users.
This is a kind of problem with online shopping, you have to give out your personal data (real name, shipping address) to get the things you buy... and Amazon knows this, and knows that this data is more valuable than the other stuff they sell...

Time will come, amazon will die and new existing ICO for online marketplace will come. Amazon is now overrated and it is a mistake for the people to trust their service. They did not respect the ideology of bitcoin, decentralized and transparent to the people. If ever it will happen, the buyers and sellers of this giant tech are at risks.

[HitbtcSCAM]

So this means it is time to buy on Open Bazaar market and let Amazon die

[boy130]

He's a little late to the party, there are already a few blockchain intelligence tools that are looking to map the blockchain, including tracking wallet owners and interlacing it with KYC data (obtained from somewhere?). That's why Bitcoin isn't as private as it could have been, publicly identifiable addresses limits its privacy value.

[BountyX]

Looks like Jeff Bezos wants to get involved in Bitcoin... the wrong way:

Amazon filed a patent to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions and sell the data to law enforcement

One example is a data stream that publishes or includes global bitcoin transactions (or any crypto currency transaction). These transactions are completely visible to each participant in the network. The raw transaction data may have little meaning to a customer unless the customer has a way to correlate various elements of the stream with other useful data. For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream. A group of telecommunications providers may subscribe downstream to the combined data stream and be able to correlate the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the transactions to countries of origin. Government agencies may be able to subscribe downstream and correlate tax transaction data to help identify transaction participants.

Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.

This is really very interesting. And this also it putting a tombstone on the dreams of mass adoption preserving anonimity. You won't be able to have both.

[cellard]

Looks like Jeff Bezos wants to get involved in Bitcoin... the wrong way:

Amazon filed a patent to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions and sell the data to law enforcement

One example is a data stream that publishes or includes global bitcoin transactions (or any crypto currency transaction). These transactions are completely visible to each participant in the network. The raw transaction data may have little meaning to a customer unless the customer has a way to correlate various elements of the stream with other useful data. For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream. A group of telecommunications providers may subscribe downstream to the combined data stream and be able to correlate the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the transactions to countries of origin. Government agencies may be able to subscribe downstream and correlate tax transaction data to help identify transaction participants.

Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.

This is really very interesting. And this also it putting a tombstone on the dreams of mass adoption preserving anonimity. You won't be able to have both.

Whoever had such dreams was as delusional as those thinking that using Coinbase wouldn't end up in IRScentral. I mean it's really ridiculous how deluded people are. Amazon is working with NSA for a while, their Alexa thing is an spying robot straight from Orwell.

Anonymity will never be mainstream. Governments are anti-anonymity, they want to know where your money is and what are you doing, that's what government's do. Who is surprised about corporations complying with that?

What would Amazon possibly gain from doing otherwise? how would Amazon possibly let people buy anonymously and get away with it? These things don't work like that, as long as governments exist.

[Thirdspace]

Amazon wants to get his nose into the coins of the users, so you can already see how things will work if Amazon ever accepts Bitcoin, they will attempt to track everything and sell your information, just like Facebook.

so when Facebook got in troubles for 'leaking' user information, Amazon can't be touched for the same issue
Amazon will be able to avoid it by shielding behind the idea of public blockchain, eh?
They will defend themselves saying those info are already available publicly,
they just gathering, processing and presenting those data in a better readable understandable form

What would Amazon possibly gain from doing otherwise? how would Amazon possibly let people buy anonymously and get away with it? These things don't work like that, as long as governments exist.

Amazon would gain big profits from selling user's information and behavior to marketers and anyone who needs such data
and they could let people buy it anonymously but not true/pure anonymous as the buyer would hope
in the end they will also sell all the buyer's data to their (buyer) competing companies in the same business sector 

[r1s2g3]

I think these big Corporations will gather these data create some new subject like "Selling Engineering" in which they will target the particular individual and decide what they should try to sell that individual at what price or so on (Extensions to Analytics,Forecasting or Customer Demographics etc.)
I think Selling Engineering  (or whatever system these corporation will create) will just be legal form of Social Engineering.