Microsoft's Forgotten Patent

Back in January 2012, Microsoft was awarded the patent for a technology officially termed “pedestrianroute production”. In essence, the patent describes several “new” sources of information that could be quantified, and subsequently implemented in a GPS application or device. The motivation is that a user would easily be able to create routes based upon more than the traditional set of filters: distance, estimated travel time, and the inclusion of “stops” at certain points. Two of the three proposed categories of filters/options in the patent would be rather useful in practice, but not controversial enough for an entire blog post: weather information, and terrain information. Integrating weather information sources into a GPS system would allow for a user to consider whether he/she wished to avoid an “open area subject to harsh temperatures”, or similar conditions when creating a travel plan between two points. Filters based upon terrain information, in comparison to weather information, would provide routing options based on data such as total change and rate of change in elevation, existence or lack of paved roads, and whether sidewalks are available. While such pieces of information and their corresponding filter sets would likely have great utility to your average pedestrian, I'd like to focus the rest of this post on the one that I haven't yet mentioned: “security information”.

Similar to customizing your route based upon localized weather and terrain information, the minds at Microsoft also reported that the concept could create filters based upon data derived from “violent crime statistics”, and “demographic information”. Many online news outlets and other blogs were quick to call the patent an “avoid ghetto” feature, with some going as far as to question whether the idea was “racist” in nature. Be that as it may, there are certainly parts of every major city (Hoboken included) that its locals are cautioned to avoid at night – Microsoft's patent only details the possibility of passing this knowledge onto a given city's visitors.

Avoiding crime-riddled neighborhoods is only the start. If the source of the data used in compiling the “security information” were tweaked to include other sources, Microsoft (or whoever it were to sell or lease the technology to) could effectively, and rather trivially, silently decide default routes based upon previous user experiences, or any other arbitrary statistic(s). From an advertising perspective, a business could pay GPS companies to create walking directions with a silently added parameter: the business' storefront or billboard as an invisible “waypoint”. In addition, adapting this set of filters to the battlefield could prevent hundreds of lives from being lost – a program that leverages this technology and the right set of data could, in theory, automatically route military squads based upon enemy combatant concentration per square mile, and/or upon any of several dozens of other factors.

As far as I have been able to find, the innovation(s) noted in the patent have not actually progressed any further, nor have they been implemented in any application. However, based on recent events, it isn't beyond imagination that the technologies discussed have indeed already been (quietly) implemented in way or another – and, if not, I bet they eventually will.