From AP, via The Seattle Times:
Microsoft ‘s Beijing-based researchers are analyzing Web-surfing patterns to guess computer users’ gender, age and other demographic information, a technology the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders worries the Chinese government could misuse.
As detailed in a paper presented at the May 2007 WWW conference in Canada, Microsoft’s researchers looked at the Web surfing history for people whose gender and age they knew, then applied that data to predict how likely a gender or age group was to visit certain Web sites. The researchers grouped similar Web sites, assuming people of similar demographic profiles visited similar sites.
Researchers found that with the resulting formulas, their guesses about gender improved about 30 percent, and guesses about age improved 50 percent, compared with baseline algorithms.[Full Text]
