Patent Issued for System, Method, And Computer Program Product For Call Tracking Using Caller Identification In Cross-Channel Marketing Automation Management Support With Intelligent Privacy Protection (USPTO 10,609,212)

2020 APR 14 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Dialogtech Inc. (Chicago, Illinois, United States) has been issued patent number 10,609,212, according to news reporting originating out of Alexandria, Virginia, by NewsRx editors.

The patent’s inventors are Shapiro, Irvin M. (Chicago, IL); Price, Shannon M. (Chicago, IL).

This patent was filed on March 21, 2017 and was published online on April 13, 2020.

From the background information supplied by the inventors, news correspondents obtained the following quote: “PII or Sensitive Personal Information (SPI), in privacy and information security law, refers to information that can be used on its own, or with other information, to identify, contact, or locate a person.

“NIST Special Publication 800-122 defines PII as ‘any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity, such as name, social security number, date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, or biometric records; and (2) any other information that is linked or linkable to an individual, such as medical, educational, financial, and employment information.’ NIST also directs that, for the express purpose of distinguishing individual identity, clearly classify a person’s full name, home address, email address (if private from an association/club membership, etc.), IP address (when linked, but not PII by itself in US) and telephone number as examples of PII.

“Under such a definition, a user’s IP address is not PII but can be ‘linked PII,’ a ‘quasi identifier’ or a ‘pseudo-identifier,’ when it is combined with other information and the combination serves to enable identification, contact or location of a person.

“The gathering of PII by organizations via Internet use as well as breaches of Internet security, network security and web browser security has become wide spread. That collection, though not always used for criminal activity, can be used for such ends. As a result, various laws and regulations have been placed on gathering and use of such PII in countries around the world.

“One of the primary focuses of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), is to protect a patient’s Protected Health Information (PHI), which is similar to PII (or may be theoretically considered to be included in PII). Additionally, various states in the United States have privacy laws regarding protection of PII and/or personal information. Likewise, various other countries have their own versions of privacy and data protection laws including Australia, the European Union and Canada.”

Supplementing the background information on this patent, NewsRx reporters also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “Accordingly, various disclosed embodiments provide a system, methods, and computer program products for performing call tracking in a novel way wherein caller ID data is obfuscated so as to preserve a caller’s privacy by protecting their telephone number.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“What is claimed is:

“1. A cross-channel marketing automation management support system that serves contact phone numbers for display at a client web site and uses the numbers to match web-based activity of a prospective customer with a voice call to one of the served contact phone numbers, the system comprising: at least one database including the contact phone numbers organized into pools of available contact phone numbers for insertion on a page of the client web site; and at least one server coupled to the at least one database and running software that selects one of the contact phone numbers from one pool of available contact phone numbers for insertion on the page of the client web site based on data indicating the prospective customer’s web-based activity that is sent to the at least one server as a result of the prospective customer’s computer requesting the page of the client web site while visiting the client web site, wherein the prospective customer’s web-based activity is matched up with the voice call to the one of the served contact phone numbers to associate the web-based activity and voice call activity of the prospective customer with each other, and wherein caller ID data for the voice call is one way encrypted to generate modified caller ID data that is used to associate the web-based activity and the voice call activity.

“2. The system of claim 1, wherein the modified caller ID data comprises an obfuscated Numbering Plan Area number.

“3. The system of claim 2, wherein the modified caller ID data comprises an obfuscated area code.

“4. The system of claim 3, wherein the system identifies geo-location data prior to the one way encryption and stores the geo-location data with the modified caller ID data.

“5. The system of claim 1, wherein the system performs one way encryption in a consistent manner across all incoming voice calls.

“6. The system of claim 1, wherein the system generates a modified caller ID data that is not a useable phone number.

“7. The system of claim 1, wherein system generates call log data for the modified caller ID data that indicates call frequency.

“8. The system of claim 1, wherein the system performs a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) transformation to generate the modified caller ID data.

“9. A method for anonymizing caller ID data during call tracking, the method comprising: initiating a call using a contact phone number; retrieving one or more of geo-location and third party data related to the initiated call based on caller ID data transmitted in the initiation: anonymizing the initiated call by one way encrypting the caller ID data creating modified caller ID data; and sending the modified caller ID data to a call processing media server to route the modified caller ID data and the initiated call to a contact phone number destination.

“10. The method of claim 9, wherein the modified caller ID data comprises an obfuscated Numbering Plan Area number.

“11. The method of claim 9, wherein the modified caller ID data comprises an obfuscated area code.

“12. The method of claim 9, wherein the one way encryption is performed in a consistent manner across all incoming voice calls.

“13. The method of claim 9, wherein the modified caller ID data is not a useable phone number.

“14. The method of claim 9, further comprising generating call log data for the modified caller ID data that indicates call frequency.

“15. The method of claim 9, wherein a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) transformation is performed to generate the modified caller ID data.

“16. A cross-channel marketing automation management support system that consistently generates trackable modified caller IDs while maintaining caller privacy, the system comprising: a server that accepts incoming calls with a trackable contact number that has been issued to an incoming caller based on a web-based activity of the incoming caller, the server further configured to transform a caller ID of the incoming caller via one-way encryption to generate modified caller ID data and to route the incoming calls with the modified caller ID data to a call processing media server to route and track the incoming calls.

“17. The system of claim 16, wherein the call processing media server is configured to only receive the modified caller ID data.

“18. The system of claim 16, wherein the server performs a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) transformation to generate the modified caller ID data.

“19. The system of claim 16, wherein the modified caller ID data comprises an obfuscated Numbering Plan Area number.

“20. The system of claim 17, wherein the modified caller ID data comprises an obfuscated area code.”

For the URL and additional information on this patent, see: Shapiro, Irvin M.; Price, Shannon M. System, Method, And Computer Program Product For Call Tracking Using Caller Identification In Cross-Channel Marketing Automation Management Support With Intelligent Privacy Protection. U.S. Patent Number 10,609,212, filed March 21, 2017, and published online on April 13, 2020. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,609,212.PN.&OS=PN/10,609,212RS=PN/10,609,212

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