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AssigneeT-Mobile USA, Inc.
InventorsRami Al-Kabra, Prem Kumar Bodiga, Noah Dahlstrom, Ruchir Sinha, Jonathan Morrow, Aaron Drake, Chuong Phan
Estimating the term…
Techniques for identifying certain types of network activity are disclosed, including parsing network traffic to automatically recognize anonymous identifiers. Such techniques may be used to identify and eliminate malicious and/or undesirable network traffic, and to identify topics relevant to a user of a particular network device so that communications to such a user are more likely to relate to a topic of interest to the user.
A computer-implemented method, comprising:
A computer-implemented method, comprising:
One or more non-transitory computer-readable media containing executable instructions that, if executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
One or more non-transitory computer-readable media containing executable instructions that, if executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
A computer-implemented method, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.
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Protecting personal data, e.g. for financial or medical purposes: by anonymising data, e.g. decorrelating personal data from the owner's…
Wherein the identity of one or more communicating identities is hidden: anonymous communication, i.e. the party's identifiers are hidden from the…
Protocols: based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
Network services: tracking the activity of the user
About 11 years 4 months of term left · ends 4 Mar 2038 (estimated)
Electronic device manufacturers have implemented various techniques to assist in documenting and tracking electronic devices, including storing accessible device identifiers in device memory. Typically, such identifiers were simply a specific serial number permanently associated with the electronic device. There are advantages to having such a device-specific identifier, but as technology developed, such identifiers proved to be a vehicle by which most advertising companies profiled cellular telephone users for marketing purposes. Over time, issues were raised about provision of device identifiers to marketing companies without a device user's permission. In response, some device manufacturers began using advertisement identifiers, which could be changed by a device user and, therefore, were not permanently linked to an electronic device.
The detailed description is described with reference to the accompanying figures, in which the left-most digit(s) of a reference number identifies the figure in which the reference number first appears. The use of the same reference numbers in different figures indicates similar or identical items.
FIG. 1 is a diagram of an example cellular network environment in which the technological solutions described herein may be implemented.
FIG. 2 is a diagram of an example network server environment in accordance with the technologies described herein.
This disclosure is directed to techniques for ascertaining network devices that are used with anonymous identifiers. Because the anonymous identifiers are anonymous, techniques are also disclosed for identifying character strings as anonymous identifiers. The character strings that contain anonymous identifiers are included in network traffic between a network device and remote server that is in communication with the network. In at least one implementation, the network device is a cellular user device, such as a cell phone or a cellular-enabled tablet computer, and the network is a cellular network. Also, in at least one implementation of the techniques described herein, the anonymous identifiers are advertising identifiers commonly used in network communications. However, the described techniques are not limited to such implementations.
The presently described techniques may be used to identify advertising identifiers to detect malicious activity and thereby improve network performance and user experience. Advertising identifiers identified by way of one or more techniques described herein may also be used to identify users having an interest in a particular subject and providing specific content to individual users through network devices employed by the users.
In general, communications over a network by a network device are monitored and URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are detected and parsed. Character strings having a particular format are extracted and examined using certain techniques to verify that a character string is an anonymous identifier. When an anonymous identifier is verified, a unique device identifier associated with a device transmitting the URL data is associated with the anonymous identifier. Hence, a particular anonymous identifier can be connected with a particular device.