Male or Female? Your Browser's History Might Tell

A website should not be able to read the the history of websites that a visitor to the site has visited previously in the web browser. An ingenious CSS hack and some spicy Javascript is however enough to use a trial and error method to find out if a user has been to specific websites. The method takes into account that visited websites are displayed different in the browser which makes them identifiable by scripts

Some webmasters use this method to display the social bookmarking and news batches of websites that their visitors have been on which is very effective in gaining popularity on those websites.

Others came up with a script that is using this method to estimate if a visitor is male or female. The Javascript makes use of the Quantcast Top 10K websites and the male:female ratio that they provide plus a neat algorithm to compute the percentages for male and female likeliness.

Mine turned out 50/50 because I don't use the history at all. Good luck and let me know what the script thinks about your gender..

The same principle could possible be used to display targeted advertisements. Have been to a lot of parenting websites lately? How about parenting ads? Like sports? How about an ESPN subscription? It's a bit scary, don't you think?

Update: Some browser companies have added protection against these kind of information retrieval techniques. You will receive a 50/50 ratio in those browsers as well if you run the browsing history analyzer on them. Mozilla, makers of the Firefox web browser have closed the leak in 2010 for instance so that all Firefox versions from that point in time on do not reveal information about previously visited websites anymore, at least not in situations where CSS is used to find out about that.

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