Using your Browser URL History to Guess your Gender

Mon, Jul 28, 2008

Tech  




Ideally, any website should not be able to read the the history of sites that a user visited previously. Even Google is not capable of tracking the previous sites a user has visited. But a small CSS hack and some spicy Javascript is just enough to use a trial and error method to find out if a user has been to specific websites.

Mikeonads came up with a script that is using this method to estimate if the visitor is male or female. The Javascript makes use of the Quantcast Top 10K websites and the male:female ratio that they provide plus a neat algorithm to compute the percentages for male and female likeliness.

Mine turned out 50/50 :( because I have switched off my history !! Good luck and let me know what the script thinks about your gender ;)

The same principle could possible be used to display targeted advertisements. Have been to a lot of parenting websites lately? How about parenting ads? Like sports? How about an ESPN subscription? It’s a bit scary, don’t you think? But not to worry as of now, without running the javascript, your privacy is still maintained.


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Related Posts:

  1. Internet Browser Privacy – You Better Start (to) Panic
  2. Change a Face in Terms of Age, Race and Gender
  3. Guess Google !!!
  4. Orca – A Firefox 3 Based Browser
  5. Browser and OS Stats for April 2009





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2 Comments For This Post

  1. John Williams Says:

    Pretty nice site, wants to see much more on it! :)

    [Reply]

  2. techniqueal t. Says:

    interesting! i really wonder their algo on this one. ^_^

    [Reply]

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