COPYRIGHT NOTICE

A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has not objected to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.

FIELD OF THE DISCLOSURE

The invention relates generally to systems and methods for secure communications and particularly to selectively redacting co-browsing content presented certain users in a multi-user session.

BACKGROUND

Co-browsing allows a first user, such as a customer of a business, to be presented content and perform interactions on their device executing a web browser or other application while a second user, such as an agent of a business, is presented with the same view as the first user on their own device. As a benefit, the second user sees what is occurring just as if they were looking over the shoulder of the first user. This is often accompanied by a second channel of communication, such as a voice call or text chat between the first and second users. As a benefit, the first user may receive guidance, troubleshooting assistance, or other expertise provided by the second user related to the web page or application having the benefit of knowing exactly what information is presented, and the operations provided, on the first user's device. For example, a customer may require assistance completing an on-line form, such as an application for a loan or insurance. Accordingly, an agent may be networked to the customer and view the specific details of the customer and provide guidance, by verbally or textually instructing the customer, or optionally by the agent performing operations remotely on the customer's computer.

During a multiparty co-browsing session, a user may need to share a document having a least one portion not appropriate for one of the other participants in the co-browsing session. While a user may identify certain portions to be restricted, such an action requires the user knows the parties on the session, and correctly identifies the document portion and correctly identifies the users who are, or are not, able see a particular portion of the document. While such systems improve security, problems remain.

SUMMARY

During active co-browsing session a user, such as customer of a business, may select and share a document dynamically. However, in a multiparty co-browsing session of the prior art, when a customer shares the selected document, is it is presented to all participants in the session. The customer may not be aware of the identity of participants in the co-browsing session or may not be aware of the role or appropriateness of each participant in an organization and their organization's authorization to view a particular document, portion of a document, or other content. Co-browsing sessions often comprise a second communication channel, such as text or voice, wherein the participants may communicate, such as to discuss issues or options related to the purpose of the co-browsing session. For example, a customer may be applying for a loan. The bank sets up a co-browsing session between the customer and two individuals. The customer may or may not be informed of any documents that may be discussed during the session and almost certainly is not aware of any difference between the two bank employees when it comes to security or their authorization to view the customer's personal or confidential information. During a co-browsing session, one of the bank's employees, an underwriting agent, may need to see a document and the personal details on the document (e.g., sources of income and amounts, bank accounts and balances, etc.) while a second bank employee, a processing clerk, may only need to see general information (e.g., title of the document, date signed, etc.) and not the personal details. Accordingly, when asked to provide the document, the customer may retrieve the document from local or remote storage for use in a co-browsing application or other application, such as a web browser configured for co-browsing. Co-browsing systems and methods of the prior art would then present an image of the document to both agents and thereby unnecessarily expose the confidential information contained in the document.

These and other needs are addressed by the various embodiments and configurations of the present invention. The present invention can provide a number of advantages depending on the particular configuration. These and other advantages will be apparent from the disclosure of the invention(s) contained herein.

In one embodiment, the user (e.g., a customer) dynamically picks a document or other content with a visual element (e.g., display generated by an application, website viewed on a browser, desktop, device or application settings, media file, input device operation, etc.) and shares it with the business, such as with multiple agents of a contact center during a multi-party active co-browsing session. Rather than requiring the user to predefine portions of the document that are, or are not, to be visible or redacted for which agents prior to sharing the document, the customer merely shares the document and, in one embodiment, an artificially intelligent (AI) agent first analyze the document and determine the portion(s) that are and are not to be visible to which ones of the agents. As a benefit, sharing documents omits preprocessing by the providing user to define fields and their associated security requirements prior to sharing. As a further benefit, agents or other participants viewing the document are presented with an image of the document (or other content) as modified to apply their particular security authorizations which differs from other agents depending on the agents differing level of authority, and without requiring human intervention beyond selecting the document or other content for sharing in the co-browsing session.

In one embodiment, a co-browsing application, which may be a stand-alone application, or included as a portion of another application, such as a web browser, web browser plug-in, and/or other application. As described herein, an image of the document (or other content) is provided with authorized content, to those authorized, and omits portions to parties not authorized, automatically and without the customer's, or other human's, intervention.

In one embodiment, the AI agent scans documents, web pages, or other content selected to be provided by one party to others in a multi-party co-browsing session. The providing user (e.g., customer) may be provided with a view showing highlights and/or other annotations to identify portions of the document that are, or are not, being provided to others in the session. Optionally, what is, or is not, provided, may be identified with respect to a particular party. Accordingly, if the user determines that a particular portion is being redacted unnecessarily, the user may override the AI agent's decision. Conversely, the user may identify a portion as needing to be redacted which was not identified as being redacted by the AI agent. The providing user may then override the AI, which then is used as an input to a subsequent training of the AI agent to identify the portion as being incorrectly redacted, or not redacted. As a result, the AI agent may learn what to block and for whom based on prior training. In another embodiment, scoring may be provided wherein content of the document is scored for privacy, security, or other reason and based on the score being above a particular threshold, redacted from view for others, which may depend upon a security score. For example, if a field has a security score of 79, then sharing the document will only reveal the field to participants having a security authorization of 79 or higher. Scoring may be provided via seed input and refined as subsequent viewings of the same, or similar, portions of documents are overridden.

In one example, a customer and agent are in a co-browsing session to complete a loan form. To verify credit the customer shares a credit card billing statement. The agent brings a credibility survey department officer into the co-browsing session to view the statement and validate the customers loan credit worthiness. The customer, agent, and the credibility officer are in the co-browsing session, if the customer shares the document entire document is visible to all the party in the session. This unnecessarily exposes sensitive information to the agent and may expose sensitive information to theft or unauthorized use by the agent or by another party having access to the agent's communication device or other information.

Accordingly, and in one embodiment, when the customer shares the document with the agent and credibility officer present, the AI agent first scans the document and depending on the calculated sensitive score level for various portions of the document, the document may be redacted and an annotated version presented to the customer to reflect proposed redactions and which party would be subject to the redactions.

If the customer agrees, or takes no action, the document with participant-specific redactions applied is presented to the participants and a subsequent weighting, confirming the correct decision was made by the AI, up-weights the decision making the same decision more likely in the future for the same, or similar, content. However, the customer is presented with the opportunity to modify the redactions, to redact previously unredacted portions or unredacted previously redacted portions, prior or after the redacted version(s) are presented. An override, then down-weights the decision making the same decision less likely in the future for the same, or similar, content.

In another embodiment, during a co-browsing session, such as between two or more employees, a document may be shared comprising sensitive and non-sensitive components for at last one of the employees. Fields or other portions of the document may be blocked based on rank, department within the company, or AI determined “need to know” based on the employees' membership within a particular category of the company's employees.

In another embodiment, training the AI agent may comprise, the analysis of past document sharing sessions of the sharing person, then build a history of what all fields been marked as sensitive (or non-sensitive) corresponding to which participant; the AI system then seeks the same or similar fields for mapping against the participants in a subsequent document sharing session; record and feed any manual adjustments make by the person sharing the document as a subsequent training of the AI system, such as to change the sensitive score level for the fields or portion against the participant for which the field or portion is, or is not, blocked.

When training the AI model, infrequent modifications will be scored lower, in terms of confidence, and applied less frequently by the AI agent, whereas constant overrides will score higher, again in terms of confidence, and subsequently be applied more frequently is subsequent encounters. The AI system may further be trained based on the person, or an attribute of the person, such as role, department, title, relationship to the sharing party and/or other participating party and their role, title, etc. such as when comprising a party or parties in a busines. For customer-agent sharing, consideration may be given to attributes of the customer (e.g., membership to a particular tier or level, demographics, financial status, point in a customer journey, etc. Additionally or alternatively, a manual review by a person or panel may audit and/or correct erroneous decisions made by the AI agent. This may be triggered by a participant flagging a decision by the AI agent as inappropriate or otherwise needing review.

In one embodiment, a system is disclosed, comprising: a network interface to a network; a data storage; a processor configured with machine-readable instructions maintained in a non-transitory memory; and wherein the processor: receiving a submitted image from a first communication device; determining, for each of a number of portions of the submitted image, a security requirement; access, for ones of a number of recipients, an authorization attribute; generate, for ones of the number of recipients, corresponding ones of presentation images to comprise the submitted image modified to redact the number of portions of the submitted image that are not authorized for the corresponding ones of the number of recipients, wherein authorization is determined to be absent when the security requirement is more restrictive than the authorization attribute for the corresponding ones of the number of recipients; and transmit the presentation images to the corresponding ones of the number of recipients.

In another embodiment, a method is disclosed comprising: receiving a submitted image from a first communication device; determining, for each of a number of portions of the submitted image, a security requirement; accessing, for ones of a number of recipients, an authorization attribute; generating, for ones of the number of recipients, corresponding ones of presentation images to comprise the submitted image modified to redact the number of portions of the submitted image that are not authorized for the corresponding ones of the number of recipients, wherein authorization is determined to be absent when the security requirement is more restrictive than the authorization attribute for the corresponding ones of the number of recipients; and transmit the presentation images to the corresponding ones of the number of recipients.

In another embodiment, a s system is disclosed, comprising: means for receiving a submitted image from a first communication device; means for determining, for each of a number of portions of the submitted image, a security requirement; means for determining, for ones of a number of recipients, an authorization attribute; means for generating, for ones of the number of recipients, corresponding ones of presentation images to comprise the submitted image modified to redact the number of portions of the submitted image that are not authorized for the corresponding ones of the number of recipients, wherein authorization is determined to be absent when the security requirement is more restrictive than the authorization attribute for the corresponding ones of the number of recipients; and means for transmit the presentation images to the corresponding ones of the number of recipients.

A system on a chip (SoC) including any one or more of the above embodiments.

Any one or more of the aspects as substantially described herein.

Any of the described aspects, wherein the data storage comprises a non-transitory storage device comprise at least one of: an on-chip memory within the processor, a register of the processor, an on-board memory co-located on a processing board with the processor, a memory accessible to the processor via a bus, a magnetic media, an optical media, a solid-state media, an input-output buffer, a memory of an input-output component in communication with the processor, a network communication buffer, and a networked component in communication with the processor via a network interface.

The phrases “at least one,” “one or more,” “or,” and “and/or” are open-ended expressions that are both conjunctive and disjunctive in operation. For example, each of the expressions “at least one of A, B, and C,” “at least one of A, B, or C,” “one or more of A, B, and C,” “one or more of A, B, or C,” “A, B, and/or C,” and “A, B, or C” means A alone, B alone, C alone, A and B together, A and C together, B and C together, or A, B, and C together.

The term “a” or “an” entity refers to one or more of that entity. As such, the terms “a” (or “an”), “one or more,” and “at least one” can be used interchangeably herein. It is also to be noted that the terms “comprising,” “including,” and “having” can be used interchangeably.

The term “automatic” and variations thereof, as used herein, refers to any process or operation, which is typically continuous or semi-continuous, done without material human input when the process or operation is performed. However, a process or operation can be automatic, even though performance of the process or operation uses material or immaterial human input, if the input is received before performance of the process or operation. Human input is deemed to be material if such input influences how the process or operation will be performed. Human input that consents to the performance of the process or operation is not deemed to be “material.”

Aspects of the present disclosure may take the form of an embodiment that is entirely hardware, an embodiment that is entirely software (including firmware, resident software, micro-code, etc.) or an embodiment combining software and hardware aspects that may all generally be referred to herein as a “circuit,” “module,” or “system.” Any combination of one or more computer-readable medium(s) may be utilized. The computer-readable medium may be a computer-readable signal medium or a computer-readable storage medium.

A computer-readable storage medium may be, for example, but not limited to, an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system, apparatus, or device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing. More specific examples (a non-exhaustive list) of the computer-readable storage medium would include the following: an electrical connection having one or more wires, a portable computer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM or Flash memory), an optical fiber, a portable compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM), an optical storage device, a magnetic storage device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing. In the context of this document, a computer-readable storage medium may be any tangible, non-transitory medium that can contain or store a program for use by or in connection with an instruction execution system, apparatus, or device.

A computer-readable signal medium may include a propagated data signal with computer-readable program code embodied therein, for example, in baseband or as part of a carrier wave. Such a propagated signal may take any of a variety of forms, including, but not limited to, electro-magnetic, optical, or any suitable combination thereof. A computer-readable signal medium may be any computer-readable medium that is not a computer-readable storage medium and that can communicate, propagate, or transport a program for use by or in connection with an instruction execution system, apparatus, or device. Program code embodied on a computer-readable medium may be transmitted using any appropriate medium, including, but not limited to, wireless, wireline, optical fiber cable, RF, etc., or any suitable combination of the foregoing.

The terms “determine,” “calculate,” “compute,” and variations thereof, as used herein, are used interchangeably and include any type of methodology, process, mathematical operation or technique.

The term “means” as used herein shall be given its broadest possible interpretation in accordance with 35 U.S.C., Section 112(f) and/or Section 112, Paragraph 6. Accordingly, a claim incorporating the term “means” shall cover all structures, materials, or acts set forth herein, and all of the equivalents thereof. Further, the structures, materials or acts and the equivalents thereof shall include all those described in the summary, brief description of the drawings, detailed description, abstract, and claims themselves.

The preceding is a simplified summary of the invention to provide an understanding of some aspects of the invention. This summary is neither an extensive nor exhaustive overview of the invention and its various embodiments. It is intended neither to identify key or critical elements of the invention nor to delineate the scope of the invention but to present selected concepts of the invention in a simplified form as an introduction to the more detailed description presented below. As will be appreciated, other embodiments of the invention are possible utilizing, alone or in combination, one or more of the features set forth above or described in detail below. Also, while the disclosure is presented in terms of exemplary embodiments, it should be appreciated that an individual aspect of the disclosure can be separately claimed.

