what the internet knows about you- Privacy Online

[babyoh]

Websites can read our History files.
- To see this in action, click:
http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/
- How It Works:
http://whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com/docs/details.html
- here's someone who uses the data to guess user's gender:
http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/
- and here's a script someone wrote, using the data to figure out what badges to display on his page:
http://code.google.com/p/aza/source/browse/trunk/SocialHistory/SocialHistory.js

** apparently, this is an issue with ALL browsers- the only 'Fix' is to not allow a History to be kept at all.

NOTE: some ppl don't care about these kinds of things, but i'm amazed at much data we 'leak' onto the web without realizing.

[Corrine]

The History site didn't have anything recent and there were no results with FF on the guess the gender site and it stopped IE8 from working.  I do recall trying it before and it was wrong. 

It is true that there are privacy issues.  However, there is a cure.  Disconnect from the internet.  Even after clearing the history, doing one search will result in targeted results until history is cleared again.  Also, don't forget those hard to remove Flash cookies.  The important thing is to be careful when shopping and banking online.

[Aaron Hulett]

I'm trying to understand if there's any information disclosure (a.k.a. does the history actually get uploaded to their site, or is it local rendering only).  Not interested enough to dig.

The gender guess thingy says I'm more likely female than male.  It would be more accurate had I been female. ;)

//A

[winchester73]

The gender guess thingy says I'm more likely female than male.  It would be more accurate had I been female. ;)

//A

You did better than me ... I tried the link twice, and it crashed my IE twice.  Wonder what that makes me gender-wise?   :hysterical:

[Corrine]

Interesting.  We both have ESET and the page crashed IE8.  I tried on another machine with MSE and it worked. 

[Eric the Red]

I tried it with FF and got this:

Congratulations, we did not find anything in this category in your browser history.
Feel free to try our other browser history tests.

I guess it couldn't get in to read my history  :)