The Zuckerberg Patent Application: Another Seed in the Walled Garden?

Someone on Hacker News was kind enough to post a link to a patent application filed under Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's name. The application, filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) in February, has a fairly generic description, "Systems and methods for dynamically generating a privacy summary" with the abstract not giving a whole lot more detail:

"A system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary is provided. The present invention provides a system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary. A profile for a user is generated. One or more privacy setting selections are received from the user associated with the profile. The profile associated with the user is updated to incorporate the one or more privacy setting selections. A privacy summary is then generated for the profile based on the one or more privacy setting selections. "

The debate in the comments section on Hacker News rehashes problems with the USPTO, quite a bit of condescension over what some consider a generic capability already in existence, and the usual troll comments getting down-voted. After reading the patent application in all its patent-app legalese, I think that most, or all, of the commenters are missing the Trojan horse.

The patent application seems to describe a universal mechanism for setting privacy settings from a profile. Does that sound at all familiar? Might it be the same type of technique that the Data Portability Group and FriendConnect are working toward? Facebook joined the Data Portability Workgroup, and said they want to continue the conversation with FriendConnect after denying them access to the Facebook platform. I haven't thought either possibility for conversation with them sounded like it made sense; Facebook's value is supposed to be in the user data and connections. If it's no longer a walled garden, what value does it have for investors? With a patented method of setting different privacy settings for a centralized profile, Facebook could feasibly set themselves up as the hub of users' online interactions, with their platform as the base for everything else they would do online.

Of course, my tinfoil hat could be too tight as well.