6
Appeal No. 2005-0748
Application No. 09/190,727
The Goldhaber reference also discusses consumers’ past purchases or
transactions, but discloses that a consumer can choose to exclude a transaction from his
demographic or interest profile and can delete any transaction records. See Col. 6, lines
49-58. The exclusion of certain transactions from a consumer demographic profile is not
necessarily the same as removing or anonymizing all transactions from the demographic
profile. Even if the exclusion of a consumer’s past purchase or transaction from their
profile could be considered to read on “anonymizing purchase data”, it appears that
excluding past purchases or transactions requires input by the consumer. This express
passage in Goldhaber is contrary to the claim language requiring that “the combining and
anonymizing steps are performed independently of any input from the first or second
consumer.”
Claim 22 also requires “transmitting the anonymous data to at least one
merchant”. Goldhaber does not disclose transmitting purchase data relating to first and
second consumers’ orders that has been combined and anonymized to at least one
merchant. Goldhaber discloses that customer interest or demographic profiles, which
can include consumers’ past transactions or purchases, are stored at the consumers’
computers or at attention brokerage services. A software agent associated with a
consumer’s computer can present the user’s interest profile to an attention brokerage
server, or the software agent can maintain the interest profile confidential. See Col. 14,
lines 41-43 and Col. 15, lines 57-63. Although the user interest profile can be presented
to an attention brokerage service, it does not appear that there is transmission of this
data to a merchant. Moreover, as explained before, Goldhaber has not disclosed
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