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This is a pretty old issue, but this is an interesting new implementation of an old idea. Using your browser history and by matching your browsing habits the site attempts to guess your gender with a weighting system according to the gender demographics for a list of fairly popular sites.<\/p>\n
It’s not super accurate unless you are really stereotypical in your Internet usage habits, and it won’t work if you don’t accept any cookies and flush everything regularly.<\/p>\n
One of the problems that’s plagued netizens since the inception of the world wide web that their browsers have a habit of leaking every site they’ve visited in the recent past. A quick stop at Blowupdolls.com, Mysecretbusinessproject.net or any other site is available to any webmaster with rudimentary coding skills.<\/p>\n
Now the Mike on Ads blog has harnessed this privacy shortcoming into a tool that tries to predict whether the visitor is male or female. It uses a small piece of Javascript, that siphons a browser’s URL history and then analyzes the sites visited to guess whether the user is a guy or gal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s a pretty neat idea, I like the innovative thoughts involved and I really do wonder how else this could be used.<\/p>\n
It could be the next way of harvesting data online, imagine if any of the huge sites like Slashdot, Digg or the likes of Cnet started doing this how much data they could harvest!<\/p>\n
It’s unclear how accurate the tool is at guessing a visitor’s sex, although it did pronounce there was a 74 percent chance your reporter was male. More importantly, the tool is a reminder of just how easy it is for webmasters to track the browsing history of their visitors. Even when you turn off Javascript, they have other tricks up their sleeves that are much harder to foil, says Jeremiah Grossman, the CTO of WhiteHat Security, who brought the tool to our attention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It guessed me as 52% male….so does that mean I’m 48% woman? That’s a little scary.<\/p>\n
Like it says in the article though, combine this with some geolocation + some other tricks…and that’s a whole lot of information about a passing surfer.<\/p>\n
It’s perfectly viable that sites are already doing this, and no-one would even know.<\/p>\n
Time for some NoScript<\/a>?<\/p>\n
*EDIT*<\/strong> – I found some code here<\/a> that does this kind of history checking.<\/p>\n
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