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You may also be interested in GodlessLiberal, where I post most articles on this topic now.

It’s not often you see something that manages to perpetuate stupid beliefs about gender at the same time as demonstrating yet another way to invade someone’s privacy with Javascript, but this article manages it. Apparently, it looks at your browser history and guesses whether you’re male or female based on the sites you’ve visited. Now, I’m not convinced that there’s a significant gender bias for most sites, and looking at the results it looks like a sizable proportion of them were wrong ("oh noes ur site thinkz im a gurl!!!!111"). It bugs me that people even bother, though.

What’s more concerning, as Simon points out, is that apparently any site that can use javascript (i.e., any site you don’t disable it for) can find out what sites you’ve been to just by creating a link and checking whether the CSS style is :visited. I think I’m going to have to install NoScript again, despite having to use Javascript for work…

Posted Fri 01 Aug 2008 08:29:00 BST Tags: gender roles