Patent ID: 8812372

Claim:
A method of anonymising an interaction between a user entity comprising a computing device and a service provider node wishing to provide a service via a network to the user entity in dependence upon characteristics of the user entity determined or revealed as a result of the interaction, the method comprising: assigning the user entity to a plurality of sets, each set of the plurality of sets comprising as members a plurality of user entities sharing a characteristic associated with that set; ensuring that an intersection of the plurality of sets comprises at least a predetermined minimum number of user entities, wherein the predetermined minimum number of user entities is at least three; and providing to the service provider node, as part of the interaction, information relating to the characteristic associated with each set of the plurality of sets, the information being for use at the service provider node in providing the service to the user entity, as part of the interaction, that is appropriate in view of the characteristics of the user entity but insufficient to identify the user entity, wherein the assigning, ensuring and providing steps are performed at an anonymiser disposed on a communication path between the user entity computing device and the service provider node, the anonymiser comprising a node or a cooperation of nodes, wherein anonymised service is provided to the user entity via the anonymiser as part of the interaction between the user entity and the service provider; communicating, via an information broker node, with a clustering engine node to determine the plurality of sets to be assigned to the user entity, with the clustering engine node having knowledge of membership of the sets and the information broker node providing to the clustering engine node information sufficient to assign the user entity to the plurality of sets; and wherein the clustering engine node acts on abstractions of identities the translation of which to real identities is not known by the clustering engine node.