Internet & Privacy : Can a plain old web site decide whether I am a male or a female ?

Do we have any privacy on Internet? For example, when I am searching something on Google or reading emails on my gmail account, obviously Google reads them too. Otherwise how can Google put advertisements most relevant to the content of my emails on the right hand side under sponsored links? So at the end of the day, Google knows what my interests are , who I am dealing with , what my greatest fears are and almost everything about me. Let’s wish that Google will always honor their motto, “Don't be evil”. Anyway let’s forget Google for a moment.
When I was in DZone, I came across an interesting post about a widget which tries to determine whether you are a male or a female according to your browsing history. I know what you will say, “What? You gave it your browser history?“ . No, I didn’t, a simple javascript just stole that information from me. So how did it work. The script is called Social History. Idea of social history script is pretty simple. It has a set of links of social sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, etc. etc and it decides whether I have visited those links based on their css style (the color of the link). So Aza Raskin is trying to use this to show bookmark links in an optimal way. Rather than having a static set of bookmark links like I have below under each blog post, he is suggesting to present bookmarks links to sites which the reader is actually using which can be found using his script, Pretty neat idea :).
Now, Mike Nolet has gone one step further and developed a widget that tries to determine your gender based on your browser history using a simple algorithm with a modified version of Social History script. It uses US top 10K sites for this. You can try out the widget here. For me, it correctly determined I am a male with a probability 97% even though it has not worked for some people, so you better try and find out.

You may also find following video interesting about today's Internet.

Bookmark this post with:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•