Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'd be uneasy about partnering with a bunch of totalitarian control freaks like Microsoft.
Unless you happen to be the only 20-25 year old male in China I think you're safe.
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.
Nothing is more dangerous than a programmer with a screwdriver.
... wouldn't it be easier to look up the IP address and persuade the ISP to hand over the user details?
The old ways are often the best.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
If you read this post you are probably male. (80% correct)
You are probably in the 20-35 age group. (60% correct)
(I know I'll only get negative responses to this post of the type "I'm reading this and I'm a 47-year-old woman!" That's Ok. You're in the other bracket.)
My algorithm is as good as Microsoft's. Can I have a research grant please?
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
Your gender is
Your age is
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Printable Version
Right now this doesn't worry me too much - after all, how much "identification of anonymous dissidents" could someone do based only on one's gender and a rough estimate of age? On the other hand, if Microsoft do expand to geographical location, occupation, and educational degree as mentioned, then it's rather worrying.
First things first: why China? (The same question applies to Venezuela, Russia, Brazil or whatever is the target of the Slashdot "fifteen minutes of hate" of the day). Of course people should be concerned about what these countries do wrt losses of privacy and basic rights, but what about U.S. and E.U.? As we talk, they are working on a new agreement to share data from passengers on trans-Atlantic flights, a much more effective way to profile people, because it contains name, address, gender, destination, credit card number, everything, without needing to make any kind of assumption, everything is plain and clear. This is why I think that not only "in China", as the summary states, but in most countries in the world, this information can and will be used to tag people indiscriminetaly, subversive or not, terrorist or not, law abiding or not. So, take care of your own backyard before to point the poison ivy in your neighbor one.
Second, it is not like if Microsoft was the only one researching and developing on this field and, more than that, it is not like if Microsoft was not researching on this field, any government interested on this kind of technology would not research itself, or fund research on its public universities. So, throwing Microsoft name on the mix only reinforces my point, this submission is nothing but a flamebait, being the flame targets the usual suspects, proprietary software and communism.
This reminds me of the scenes in Casablanca where the police are told to round up the usual suspects. Ultimately the accuracy doesn't matter to the government anyway. Worldwide, I think we are moving in a direction of less freedom rather than more, spearheaded by wrong-headed anti-terrorism hysteria in the US. So why should they care about accuracy, they'll just round up whoever fits the profile and sort it out later, or not.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
My blog
Right, so they're about 50% sure that it's someone who's both male and aged 24-30, living in China. It should be easy to pick out the individual from there.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... which is a completely different and only slightly correlated attribute.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
99% male
75% 18-30 years old
100% single and living in Mom's basement
Hey, look, I got even more data than MS! I'll take a check now, please.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.