At&t Intellectual Property I, L.p.

At+t Corp.

Craig Ellis Wills

Balachander Krishnamurthy

Adam Christopher Bender

Methods, systems, and products protect personally identifiable information. Many websites acquire the personally identifiable information without a user's knowledge or permission. Here, though, the user may control what personally identifiable information is shared with any website. For example, the personally identifiable information may be read from a header of a packet and compared to a requirement associated with a domain name.

Protection of personally identifiable information

Tailored protection of personally identifiable information

A negotiation-based mechanism enables a user to share personally identifiable information with a requesting website, for example, a third party website such as an aggregator website that might be gathering information about the user. The user, rather than being limited to a pre-set collection of privacy options, is free to negotiate with the requesting website and agree to share more or less information with based on the user's trust of the requesting website.

Secondary leakage of private information is identified and remedied. Internet activity of a first party can result in such secondary leakage of private information of a second party. Information about the second party that would not otherwise be known becomes public based simply on related information that has been placed on a public site of a third party by the first party. Such disclosure is detected and the victim may be notified about the location. The victim can then decide if such secondary leakage is acceptable. If not, the first party or the third party may be notified, the activity may be stopped and the offending information can be removed.

Identifying and remedying secondary privacy leakage

A method and an apparatus for providing privacy in a network are disclosed. For example, the method receives a request, e.g., an HTTP request, from a user for information, wherein the information includes at least a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of at least an aggregator. The method identifies all personally identifiable information of the user. The method then masks the personally identifiable information from the browser in the endpoint device of the user, while responding to the request.

Method and apparatus for providing web privacy

The present invention is a method for improving delivery of content to a client communicating with a server on the Web. Groups or clusters of clients are formed by processing the IP addresses of the clients according to a network-aware, radix-encoded trie classification process. The groups of clients are categorized based on information about one or more clients in each group that can be determined by the server. That information is used to help drive tailored actions on the part of Web servers. Users with poor connectivity may choose not to spend much time at a Web site if it takes a long time to receive a page, even if the Web server at the site is not the bottleneck. Retaining such clients may be of interest to a Web site. Better-connected clients may be able to receive enhanced representations of Web pages such as with higher quality images.

Method for improving web performance by adapting servers based on client cluster characterization

A proxy cache maintains a copy of multiple resources from various servers in a network. When the proxy cache must generate a validation request for at least one resource at one of the servers, the proxy cache piggybacks one or more additional cache validation requests related to documents presently stored in the cache but originating from or associated with the server in question. Upon receipt of an indication of the freshness or validity of the cached copy of the document, the proxy cache can then make a determination as to whether to request an update of the document.

Growing community of inventors

Acton, MA, United States of America

Craig Ellis Wills