AUTOMATIC TRACKING OF USER DATA AND REPUTATION CHECKING

• US 20070282832A1
• Filed: 06/01/2006
• Published: 12/06/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 06/01/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Herley, Cormac E., Florencio, Dinei A.
• Granted Patent: US 7,516,418 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/6263 during internet communication, e.g. revealing personal data from cookies
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/00 Administration; Management

Abstract

A unique system and method that facilitate automatic tracking of user data and providing on-demand site or merchant reputation information is provided. The system and method involve monitoring user input such as by keystrokes over a period of time and forming a long continuous string of characters. The string of characters can be monitored for repeating substrings or non-repeating substrings that indicate sensitive user information such as SSN or credit card number (CCN). The substrings can be displayed to the user in a digest form and order according to frequency of occurrence, for example. Thus, the user can readily view where and when their sensitive information has been entered. In addition, the typing of certain substrings such as CCNs or other sensitive field data can trigger a reputation service to retrieve the reputation data for the current site or merchant to mitigate dealing with fraudulent sites or merchants.

Claims

1. A system that facilitates automatic tracking of user data comprising:

a keystroke capture component that captures keystrokes in the form of a character string;

an extraction component that extracts one or more character substrings having at least a minimum length of characters from the character string;

a string analysis component that analyzes the character substrings extracted from the character string to determine a frequency of occurrence for each extracted character substring; and

an order component that orders the extracted character substrings according to at least one parameter comprising the frequency of occurrence.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the keystroke capture component captures the keystrokes for a designated period of time.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the character string is a long, continuous string.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the extraction component locates and extracts one or more repeating character substrings with at least a minimum character length that repeat at least one time.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the at least one parameter further comprises date of entry, alphabetical order, numerical order, and location of entry.

6. The system of claim 1 is embedded in a browser.

7. The system of claim 1 further comprises an input monitoring component that monitors input entered into an active browser.

8. The system of claim 7 wherein the input is entered into the active browser in at least one of the following manners:

typed and manual selection.

9. The system of claim 7 further comprises an input tracking component that tracks substrings which repeat at least q times over a period of time.

10. The system of claim 7 further comprises a field extraction component that extracts field character string data from one or more web form fields and associates the character string data with respective metatag labels on the web form fields.

11. The system of claim 10 further comprises one or more data stores that collect extracted field character string data.

12. The system of claim 11 further comprises a count component that incrementally increases a count of the relevant extracted field character string data as each new occurrence is observed.

13. The system of claim 10 further comprises a reputation service that is triggered to retrieve on-demand site or merchant reputation data when input is entered into at least one sensitive form field.

14. A method that facilitates automatic tracking of user data comprising:

capturing keystrokes entered into an active web browser as a continuous string of characters;

analyzing the string of characters in order to find one or more substrings that repeat; and

recording one or more repeating substrings along with their associated entry locations and/or times of entry.

15. The method of claim 14 further comprises arranging the one or more repeating substrings by frequency of occurrence.

16. The method of claim 14 further comprises determining a context of the one or more repeating substrings.

17. The method of claim 14 further comprises monitoring and tracking user input as it entered, the user input comprising repeating and non-repeating substrings.

18. The method of claim 17 further comprises triggering a reputation service to obtain site or merchant reputation data when at least one of the following occurs:

at least a portion of the user input indicates a financial transaction or the user input is entered into at least one sensitive field.

19. The method of claim 14 further comprises extracting field character strings from their respective web form fields;

and increasing their counts respectively as additional occurrences of the field character strings are observed.

20. A system that facilitates automatic tracking of user data comprising:

means for capturing keystrokes in the form of a character string;

means for extracting one or more character substrings having at least a minimum length of characters from the character string;

means for analyzing the character substrings extracted from the character string to determine a frequency of occurrence for each extracted character substring; and

means for ordering the extracted character substrings according to at least one parameter comprising the frequency of occurrence.