
Using your browser url history to estimate gender - drp
http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/
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petercooper
In our house you could nail it a lot less scientifically. Just scan the domain
names and add 1 point for male with a /porn/ match and 1 female point for
/baby/. I dare say the Google seaerches would be an immediate giveaway too!

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borisk
JS doesn't have direct access to browser history, it can only find if an exact
URL is visited or not. Even that will soon go.

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sp332
I think it already doesn't work in the new Firefox 4.0 beta, or the Chrome dev
builds.

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albertzeyer
It doesn't seem to work in Chrome dev here (well it says 50% but I doubt that
my history is so less biased).

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languagehacker
Yeah, not only are they probably using two-year-old data, but if the
confidence given is 97% for it being the wrong gender for me, I doubt that
it's actually an effective tool.

There are all kinds of fuzzy behavioral ways to analyze gender. I remember
when the Gender Genie (<http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php>) made a similar
splash. The issue is that it ignores the finer-grained sociological contexts
in how certain people behave.

I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship
ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this
would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their
cultural definition of gender roles at play.

Mainstream culture subsumes a variety of subcultures and idioms, meaning that
using statistical methods to determine the characteristics of specific
behaviors within a coarse-grained social group may overgeneralize. For a more
nuanced approach, it would be a good idea to use ensembles, or add subculture
membership as a feature to a linear regression classifier.

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hugh3
_if the confidence given is 97% for it being the wrong gender for me, I doubt
that it's actually an effective tool._

Not necessarily. Of all those it predicts with a 97% confidence interval,
you'd expect it to be wrong 3% of the time. Without any information other than
that it was wrong about you, there's not much evidence about how accurate it
is.

 _I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship
ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this
would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their
cultural definition of gender roles at play._

Men dress up to attract women in just about every culture. The fact that they
also wear makeup shouldn't be surprising.

 _I can't find their name, but there is an African tribe where, as a courtship
ritual, men dress up and wear makeup to attract women. To other people, this
would sound like gender roles are reversed, but in reality, it's just their
cultural definition of gender roles at play._

My, what a lot of big words. Of course, what we're looking at is somewhat
culturally dependent; it just so happens that in our culture there's a heavily
male-biased interest in, frinstance, looking at car websites (these seem to be
the most male-dominated sites on the list it gives me). What's really
interesting, though, is to what extent these patterns persist across different
cultures... are men _always_ more interested in transport than women are?

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smallblacksun
Men (in American culture and similar ones) aren't interested in cars because
they are transport. They are interested in cars because they make noise and go
fast.

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KevBurnsJr
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 100% - Likelihood of you being MALE is 0%

This is news to me.

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jfarmer
The probability of me being female is 100%. Not sure what to make of that!

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derefr
It means, literally, that all the websites you visit are visited more often by
women than men. The implication breaks down past there—there are other reasons
for visiting female-dominated sites than _being female_. It could be (if
they're mostly content sites/blogs) that you enjoy female writing
style/viewpoint more than male writing style/viewpoint. It could be (if
they're forums/social sites) that you're single and seeking a female partner.
Many other explanations exist. This is a _correlation_ , not a causation.

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jfarmer
Definitely not true. Just looking at the list of sites they scan, I've visited
plenty that have a male/female ratio greater than 1.

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zyb09
God.. CSS Visited Hack again. WHY does nobody come up with something? I know
it's a fundamental issue, but hell.. this is a massive privacy exploit. Please
Google? W3C? Someone?

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samdk
Firefox 4 has a fix for it: [http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-
changes-com...](http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-
coming-to-css-vistited/)

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derefr
Doesn't work in Safari. (Which is a good thing, I suppose.)

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geuis
I suspect what this 'tool' really tells us is that its author needs a new
source of data as to what sites men and women visit.

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endergen
Did Bart Simpson pick that name. _Ring_ , _Ring_. "Hello, Is Mike On Ads
there?"

My Gonads, Bart Simpson

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d0m
I'm about 60% male but hey, my girlfriend use my computer sometime :D

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pingou
I'm wondering why google.co.uk has a Male-Female Ratio of 1.35.

