Apple has been granted a patent for “Privacy Protected Database Querying.” It involves privacy when using music streaming services.
About the patent
Advancements have been made in recent years that allow service providers, such as those that host music streaming services, to capture data about users of their services. This data can be used to improve the performance of the streaming services and may also be shared with partners. In some cases, however, the data may include sensitive information, which cannot be shared.
Apple’s patent is for techniques that provide a standardized and syndicated system to empower music labels to analyze and understand listeners’ behavior that engage with their content without compromising privacy, nor the reliability of the results.Summary of the patent
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “Systems, methods, and devices are described herein to query data in an entity data database. A query for information about a set of entities is received from a requesting system. The query is in a predefined format and includes search conditions. A querying strategy is determined based on the received query.
“The entity data database is queried by identifying a set of user records that fulfill a first search condition. A numerical value of the set of user records is next compared to a threshold. Depending on the numerical value, the set of user records is assigned to a first numerical bucket. Depending on the bucket, the numerical value is changed to a second numerical value, which is used to generate an aggregated count value. The aggregated count value is shared with the requesting system.”
