Amazon Patents System that Tracks Identifying Information of Bitcoin Users

Recent reports indicate that Amazon Technologies has been awarded a patent for an online marketplace, based on offering data feeds. What makes this patent especially relevant is the fact that it will include bitcoin transactions.

Based on this, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, approved Amazon’s filing of a 2014 patent, which allows the correlation of various data streams, alongside with the sale of the combined data feed as part of a subscription service for parties interested in tracking the said data. The patent filling mentions tracking bitcoin transactions twice, as part of the possible use cases of the data feed.

To put things better into perspective, the patent filling notes that: "For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream. A group of telecommunications providers may subscribe downstream to the combined data stream and be able to correlate the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the transactions to countries of origin. Government agencies may be able to subscribe downstream and correlate tax transaction data to help identify transaction participants."

Members of the digital currency community believe that the patent sounds quite fishy, given the fact that it basically offers government agencies the possibility to subscribe to the data steam of addresses, in order to track transaction participants.

However, the patent gets more in-depth: "For example, a law enforcement agency may be a customer and may desire to receive global bitcoin transactions, correlated by country, with ISP data to determine source IP addresses and shipping addresses that correlate to bitcoin addresses. The agency may not want additional available enhancements such as local bank data records. The streaming data marketplace may price this desired data out per GB (gigabyte), for example, and the agency can start running analytics on the desired data using the analysis module."

In other words, the patent is basically imagining a system capable of collecting data from all people involved with digital currencies, including users, internet providers, online stores, postal services, and more. All data will be combined into a stream, which will in return, provide personal information of the said data to government agencies. While bitcoin has been created as a fairly anonymous digital currency, as no personal identifying information needs to be submitted, Amazon is showcasing how such a system would enable mass data surveillance on cryptocurrency users.