Posted on Thursday, May 24 2007 @ 0:55 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
New software developed by Microsoft could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location by analysing your web browsing history.
But experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places.
Previous studies show there are strong correlations between the sites that people visit and their personal characteristics, says software engineer Jian Hu from Microsoft's research lab in Beijing, China. For example, 74 per cent of women seek health and medical information online, while only 58 per cent of men do. And 34 per cent of women surf the internet for information about religion, whereas 25 per cent of men do the same.
While each offers only a fairly crude insight, analytical software could use a vast range of such profiles to perform a probabilistic analysis of a person's browsing history. From that it could make a good guess about their identity, Hu and his colleagues last week told the World Wide Web 2007 conference in Banff, Canada.
More info
at NewScientistTech.
