14 DAY TRIAL // The problem with web browsers is that they remember the sites you recently visited and then have the quite annoying habit of leaking this information. Although this is not a recent discovery, it is a security issue (or better yet a privacy issue) that has been put to good use by Mike Nolet. He took inspiration from a Javascript called Social History, and came up with an application that assesses your gender by looking at your browsing history.
"One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user's browsing history to estimate age and gender. So what I did is I modified the Social History JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender," says Mike Nolet, CTO and co-founder of appnexus.
The browsers that are in use today, although they may provide adequate security against some pretty serious threats, fail to protect the user against some of the oldest security issues around. No matter what browser application you use, be it Firefox or Internet Explorer for example, your browsing history is not kept as private as it should be.
The gender guessing tool, which in my case said there was a 99% chance I am male, is accurate to a certain point - keep in mind that it deems some sites to be more masculine than others, and the other way around. The problem is not how accurate the tool is in guessing your gender; the issue is in securing your browser history so that only you know which pages you like to frequently visit.
Robert Hansen, CEO of secTheory, company that specializes in web application security, comments, "I wouldn't tell you not to use the internet, but I would certainly never tell you you're safe, which is a pretty horrible thing to say to someone. I really don't think people are in a good position from a technology perspective to defend themselves with what they're given by default in a browser."