DETAILED ACTION
This communication is in response to the request for continued examination filed 01 December 2025.
Claims 1 and 21 have been amended.
Claims 1-16 and 21-24 are currently pending.
Claims 1-16 and 21-24 are rejected.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 01 December 2025 has been entered.
Response to Amendment/Remarks
An appropriate terminal disclaimer has been filed; the nonstatutory double patenting rejections are withdrawn.
Regarding 35 USC § 101, Examiner has fully considered Applicant’s remarks but does not find them persuasive. Applicant argues that “unique identifiers are transformed, for example, by using a hash, to ensure that user data remains private. As such, the claims are not directed towards advertising, as alleged by the Office Action, but are actually directed towards data privacy. … Applicant respectfully submits that claims directed towards data privacy do not fall within the category of “certain methods of organizing human behavior” as defined by either the MPEP or the courts.” Remarks at 8. While the claims to have a step wherein identifiers are hashed, the claims are not directed to this concept alone. The claims are directed toward gathering and analyzing impression data. Impressions, according to the specification (and general knowledge in the art), are “advertisement (“ad”) impressions.” Specification at [0029]. Obscuring information to protect privacy can be a useful step in many processes, but these processes are not all directed to data privacy merely because they involve a step wherein data is hashed. The present claim are directed to advertising activities. Thus, the claims do fall into the certain methods of organizing human activity grouping, which includes advertising activities.
Claim Interpretation
Claims 1 and 21 recite “wherein the unique identifiers are transformed sing a hash to create unique identifiers, wherein the hashed unique identifiers maintain user privacy ...” (or similar). The portion “wherein the hashed unique identifiers maintain user privacy” is an intended result of a positively recited process step (i.e., “wherein the unique identifiers are transformed sing a hash to create unique identifiers”) and is not given patentable weight. Thus, “wherein the hashed unique identifiers maintain user privacy” is not considered a limitation in the claims. See MPEP 2111.04.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
11. Claims 1-16 and 21-24 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more.
Step 1
12. Claims 1-16 recite a series of steps and, therefore, is a process. Claims 21-24 recite a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium which is considered a machine or manufacture.
Step 2A-Prong One
13. Independent claims 1 and 21 recite, in part, a method and computer-readable medium for performing the steps of generating an alert to indicate that impression data is available for processing using a core pipeline, wherein the core pipeline comprises: a server API, a user profile, and a place service, and wherein the core pipeline is operable to: receive a web service query comprising report configuration parameters; and based upon the report configuration parameters, retrieving the receiving impression data associated with consumption of media relating to a campaign presented on a plurality of mobile devices, the impression data including unique identifiers associated with a first set of users who consumed the media relating to the campaign, wherein the unique identifiers are transformed using a hash to create hashed unique identifiers, wherein the hashed unique identifiers maintain user privacy; comparing the hashed unique identifiers associated with the first set of users against a second set of users to identify a set of users who are among both the first set of users and the second set of users as impression users; identifying a subset of the second set of users who are not among the first set of users as baseline users; determining, based on one or more analyses of the impression data associated with the impression users and impression data associated with the baseline users, whether the consumption of the media influenced the impression users to visit a target place during a window of time; and causing a user interface to display the results of the one or more analyses. This concept of gathering impression information and visit information and performing analyses on the data to assess whether the impressions had any impact on changing visit behavior is an abstract idea that falls into the certain methods of organizing human activity grouping (including advertising activities).
15. The mere nominal recitation of a generic computer component does not take the claim limitations out of the certain methods of organizing human activity grouping. Thus, the claims recite an abstract idea.
Step 2A-Prong Two
16. This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The claims recite the additional element of a computer (claims 1-16) or a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium (claims 21-24) and includes no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using such generic computer components. The computer or storage medium does not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because it does not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea.
Step 2B
18. The claims do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed previously with respect to Step 2A-Prong Two, the additional element in the claim amounts to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using a generic computer component. The same analysis applies here in Step 2B, i.e., mere instructions to apply an exception using a generic computer component cannot integrate a judicial exception into a practical application at Step 2A or provide an inventive concept in Step 2B. See MPEP 2106.05(f). The claims do not provide an inventive concept (significantly more than the abstract idea). The claims are ineligible.
Conclusion
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/MEREDITH A LONG/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3622