Every move you make! Microsoft seems to have taken hit 1983 classic song from The Police to heart, as a patent reveals some very elaborate data acquisition plans from the company.
Basically, Redmond wants to watch everything you do and sync it between different apps.
All in the name of bringing you quicker access to features and better search results.
Not much wrong with it in theory, but the implementation will raise more than a few eyebrows — this can easily become as much a privacy nightmare as it can make life easier for users with improved contextual search results.
Anyway, this patent was published yesterday, called ‘Query Formulation Via Task Continuum’, which aims to make search more efficient by using more data.
The goal being that since we use multiple apps for different purposes, but to complete one task, the software titan wants to let these applications communicate with each other using a mediating module.
Because while it may be one task for users, applications treat them differently as they are disconnected:
“For example, if a user is researching the topic of “dancing” for school, the user will use a first application to write things down as well as a second application such as a browser, to search different styles of dancing. However, in existing systems, the two applications are completely disconnected from each other. The first application does not provide the browser implicit hints as to what the user might be seeking when there is a switch from the first application to the second application.”
Through what Redmond calls a preferred search provider — and we all know how that ends up.
Of course, Microsoft, just like Google, now has a thing for data accumulation. And while both companies have been criticized one way or another for privacy, both continue to harvest information as they work toward optimizing the user experience on their respective platforms.
For this new development, even though it is just in patent state for now, it will be interesting the moves Microsoft makes in implementing it.
Every move they make!
source:windows10update
