This site can guess your gender by reading your browser’s history

All major browsers have a habit of maintaining a recent history of your web site visits. And by using the right tools this information can be made available to any webmaster to exploit.

Mike on Ads blog has coded a tool using this privacy shortcoming (http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/) that tries to predict whether the visitor is male or female. It uses a small piece of Javascript, that exploits a browser’s URL history and then analyzes the sites visited to guess whether the user is a guy or gal.

It’s not clear how accurate the tool is at guessing a visitor’s gender, 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.

We’re waiting for a tool that combines history with other metrics, such as a user’s IP address, geographic location, the operating system and browser model being used. But on another thought may be that is being captured and stored somewhere right this very minute and we are not even aware of it.

Its not far when we will be wishing safe net surfing to our friends just like safe travel and safe driving.

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