Quote from: amishmanish on April 20, 2018, 04:13:09 AM

Quote from: Guvn0r on April 19, 2018, 02:13:42 PM

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

News link here

Just saw this at r/bitcoin. I don't know exactly if this is good/bad for the crypto community. But I guess, if the data is sold or given only to law enforcement that should be a great reason for Govt. to stop worrying about how 'BTC would be used for illegal purposes'.

The patent application reads:

Quote

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

How is this not a form of surveillance of data? And looks likem/2018/04/18/amazon-wins-patent-for-data-feed-marketplace.html] they have been awarded the patent too...

They are narrowing down the search domain for consumers making crypto payments. This would allow them to make better sense of who is buying what. The kind of thing that amazon already does for their "suggested for you" sections.
The burden to maintain anonymity while making such transactions (by removing any direct references and using VPN for IP) will be on the consumer.

This is definitely not good. It undermines the basic tenets of crypto currency ideologies.

But similar data 'sells' have been rampant in the past too.
Airtel ad other telcos have been doing this for years in India - without any formal consent from the consumer.
Airtel sells the bill payment patterns to NBFCs to build their financial risk models for consumers based in rural/sub-urban localities ( due to the lack of other consumer data). Based on their telephone/mobile bill payment patterns , the NBFCs can gauge the riskiness of a customer with respect to loan disbursements .

As far as amazon US is concerned, the patent is a formal way or recognizing it as a law. In India, it is possibly a sandbox.
This will only be possible if ISPs and third party vendors ( where you transact using bitcoins ) sell the IP addresses linked to each btc transaction. ( which they would easily do )

Having said that, this is disturbing . A few steps towards avoiding this from the users side would be
1. To always shuffle the bitcoin address for all transactions
2. Use a VPN/ be behind a proxy server.
3. Avoid transactions that are linked to a physical address . ( avoiding delivery of goods to a location )
4. Needless to say , avoid transactions which are linked to personally identifiable information (PII) , like PAN, bank account etc
5. In case of buying coupons/goods Try using transactions which give you the option of going to the store in person and physically collecting the goods.