ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,299,174, issued on May 13, was assigned to Viasat Inc. (Carlsbad, Calif.).

"Machine-driven crowd-disambiguation of data resources" was invented by David F. Lerner (Newton, Mass.), Peter J Lepeska (Boston), Douglas C. Larrick (Newton, Mass.) and Devin R. Toth (Quincy, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Embodiments seek to protect privacy of potentially sensitive client resources in web transactions using crowd-disambiguation. Crowd-disambiguation machines can aggregate information about resources from multiple clients as resource fingerprints, and can use the fingerprints to provide crowd-sourced services in a privacy-protected manner. ...