[NetBehaviour] New software can identify you from your online habits.

[marc]

New software can identify you from your online habits.

Paul Marks.

If you thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about 
your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, 
entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent 
others from working out exactly who you are.

That is the spectre raised by new research conducted by Microsoft. The 
computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your 
name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing 
telltale patterns in your web browsing history. But experts say the idea 
is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places.

Previous studies show there are strong correlations between the sites 
that people visit and their personal characteristics, says software 
engineer Jian Hu from Microsoft's research lab in Beijing, China. For 
example, 74 per cent of women seek health and medical information 
online, while only 58 per cent of men do. And 34 per cent of women surf 
the internet for information about religion, whereas 25 per cent of men 
do the same.

While each offers only a fairly crude insight, analytical software could 
use a vast range of such profiles to perform a probabilistic analysis of 
a person's browsing history. From that it could make a good guess about 
their identity, Hu and his colleagues last week told the World Wide Web 
2007 conference in Banff, Canada.

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