

Using your browser URL history to estimate gender - paulgb
http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/

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aston
Probably safe enough for them to always say "male." The hit rate would be
pretty high given the type of person hitting that page...

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xlnt
They show how they got the result.

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unexpected
wouldn't this be easy?

1) Search browser history, look for porn. 2) If porn site = true, gender =
male 3) else gender = female

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felideon
Not really because usually that behavior is followed by "Clear History" in a
browser your wife does not know is installed but may stumble upon some day. :)

(Or you work at a corporate job.)

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nickb
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0% Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%

Oh.

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pmjordan
Apparently I'm 59% female. Hmm. I could have sworn...

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ars
Has anyone considered that this is a massive privacy issue?

Imagine an advertiser detecting which sites you've been to, and serving
different ads based on what it finds.

Edit: the author of the script thought of it:
<http://azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/> and it's bugzilla 147777
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777>

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paulgb
Yeah, it's a pretty massive privacy issue, but at least I would hope people
wouldn't do it and expect to get away with it.

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boucher
I would be pretty surprised if people weren't already doing this.

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paulgb
It would be interesting to find out. If any of the big players are doing it,
there would be a huge backlash if they got caught for it.

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boucher
Ad companies already use cookies all over the place to track users, I'm not
sure this would be that much bigger of a deal.

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david
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 99% Likelihood of you being MALE is 1%

:(

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qwph
You might want to try making contact with other users of the sites you
frequent... ;)

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PieSquared
Hmm... From the comments, it seemed to favor female...

Not a problem for me, though, since newegg.com, pricewatch.com, ubuntuforums,
etc all have 2+ ratios of men to women. Hah. (I'm male)

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dangoldin
Resulst seem pretty suspect:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 57%

Likelihood of you being MALE is 43%

Site Male-Female Ratio

google.com 0.98

commerceonline.com 0.77

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dgabriel
I'm female, but got these results -

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 45% Likelihood of you being MALE is 55%

Apparently, my surfing habits are androgynous.

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rw
Another reason to use NoScript.

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jules
Or Opera.

