Amazon has been awarded a patent for a “streaming data marketplace,” where information, including the identities of parties involved in cryptocurrency transactions, may one day be sold.
As new details continue[1] to emerge in the ongoing scandal[2] over consulting firm Cambridge Analytica's acquisition of some Facebook user data, many netizens are expressing dismay over the tension between their desires for privacy and the ways in which many leading online platforms make money: by selling user data and/or services related to those data.
In an April 17 development that is, at least for now, only tangentially related to privacy concerns, Amazon Technologies, Inc. was issued a patent (no. 9947033[3]) for a "streaming data marketplace." On this platform, data relating to cryptocurrency transactions could be coupled with other data (such as IP addresses) associated with particular blockchain addresses and sold as a single item.
Put another way, the proposed platform's users could, in some cases, pay to learn who sent a given cryptocurrency payment, who received it, and what the sender expects to receive in return. This is because while blockchain addresses themselves are pseudonymous, the identities of the individuals who use those addresses can be ascertained by connecting on-blockchain transactions to off-platform events, such as the shipping of goods from one street address to another.
Originally applied for in September 2014, the patent describes a system in which a "stream of data may be received and then correlated and combined with data from a second source as a combined stream." The marketplace's users would be able to buy the contents of both individual and combined streams, and could even purchase access to one data stream, combine that data stream with another, and use the platform to sell access
