China could abuse Microsoft research, group says
Seattle PI | at | by Mike
Microsoft's Beijing-based researchers are analyzing Web surfing patterns to guess computer users' gender, age and other demographic information, a technology the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders worries could be misused by the Chinese government.
As detailed in a paper presented at the May 2007 WWW conference in Banff, Alberta, Microsoft's researchers looked at the Web surfing history for people whose gender and age they knew and applied those data to predict how likely a gender or age group was to visit certain Web sites. The researchers grouped similar Web sites together, assuming people of similar demographic profiles visited similar sites.