E-service to manage contact information with privacy levels

Abstract

A method of providing access to a collection of electronic business cards, includes: providing an electronic business card file Web site to a user; allowing the creation of an electronic business card file by the user using said Web site, said creation comprising: allowing the user to enter information into a plurality of fields; storing said information; and sending an authentication email to the user, wherein a reply to said authentication email is required to complete said creation; allowing the user to search for one or more records; allowing the user to view said records; and if said creation is completed, allowing the setting of privacy levels by the user of each field, said setting comprising selecting one of more than two privacy levels.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO MICROFICHE APPENDIX [0001] A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the patent and trademark office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] 1. Field of the Invention [0003] The present disclosure relates to electronic commerce, more specifically electronic storage and retrieval of information. [0004] 2. Description of the Related Art[0005] The ordinary paper business card has become ubiquitous worldwide. Social rituals have even developed concerning the exchange and scrutiny of these small slips of cardboard. By some estimates, billions of business cards change hands every day, yet the cards themselves have numerous shortfalls. Each business card contains only static information on...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012] Users (those desiring access to one or more cardholder records) are permitted to search for cardholder information. Access to individual records is controlled at both the record level and the field level. Users having certain permissions (set by the cardholder) are permitted to read a defined group of records, though not necessarily all fields in each record. Thus, a cardholder may make her business information available to all users (or all users in a defined group or groups, such as “Aerospace Engineers” or “Family”), but keep certain information, such as her cellular phone number, private to all but a few individuals. Access control is implemented, in some embodiments of the present invention, with multiple privacy levels for each field, in addition to the well-known “public” and “private” levels. In these embodiments, the cardholder can specify the degree of privacy associated for each field. For example, a cellular phone number may be designated as semi-private and thus available to only those defined users granted “semi-private” access to the cardholder's data. In an alternate embodiment, more than three privacy levels are defined, allowing even more degrees of privacy and finer-grained access control.

Problems solved by technology

Business cards consume not inconsequential amounts of space, yet lack an inherent card-to-card organization.

Thus, it can be difficult to retrieve information from a stack of cards, especially if that stack numbers in the hundreds or thousands of cards.

Privacy of information is also a growing issue among modern business people.

This technology all suffers from the same limitation in that it generally lacks multi-level privacy for users and cardholders, it cannot help locate the cardholder, it (generally) lacks the ability to seamlessly export to or import from other database systems, and (with the possible exception of some prior art Web-based contact organizers) it lacks centralized control and universal access.

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