Concerns Over Microsoft's Internet User Profiling

jcatcw writes "Microsoft research on Internet user profiling could lead to tools that help repressive regimes identify anonymous dissidents, the Reporters Without Borders advocacy group warned last Friday. Microsoft's new algorithms correctly guessed the gender of a Web surfer 80% of the time, and his or her age 60% of the time. "In China, it is conceivable that this type of technology would be used to spot Internet users who regularly access such 'subversive' content as news and information websites critical of the regime," the group said."

Comments

Poor accuracy

[mws1066]

80% and 60% are both actually very poor accuracies. I wouldn't be worried; this won't be taken seriously as any type of reliable profiling.

Re:more useless statistics

[morgan_greywolf]

Actually, no. More women under the age of 65 than their male counterparts use the Internet, according to Pew Internet. If you take into account all women and men of all age groups, then women still trail men by a few percentage points.

If anything, you could say that men and women use the Internet about equally.

Now, I'm almost positive that at least 80% of Slashdot readers are male, though there are an increasing number of females on this site. Many of them I think hide and don't reveal that they are female, so the statistics might be different than most of us suspect.

M$ Apologists

[twitter]

No, it's not OK when Google does things that might be used to harm people who have done nothing wrong.

This thread, however, is about the much nastier things that M$ does gleefully. I'd enjoy it if you compared the details.

Re:Extension time methinks

[alexhs]

What about somebody writing a browser extension that performs bogus searches in the background, for no better reason than to frustrate "profiling" attempts? Is this feasible? Already done