New (Microsoft) software can identify you from your online habits

[Youngfox]

IF YOU thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent others from working out exactly who you are.

That is the spectre raised by new research conducted by Microsoft. The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. But experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places.

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=mg19426046.400&feedId=being-human_rss20

And who shall benefit from this latest bit of Microsoft wickedness?

 

[allen]

That's pretty lightweight, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, that might be somewhat valuable for tracking people who've paid cash at a kiosk to use the Net, but beyond that there are plenty of other things that can be done. If the PTB want to know who you are when you post, they know. If you are sitting at home using a fake name, you are still leaving your digital fingerprints all over the Internet when you go online.

Each packet you send out via TCP/IP (the most common protocol used to pass info around on the Internet) has your IP address attached to it, along with other data to specifically identify you. There are already companies that sell the service of being able to absolutely identify a person no matter what identity they might use as part of anti-fraud measures. That is just what is possible in the public domain. In the three-letter agencies, who knows.

Whatever is being published as coming out of Microsoft is pretty much guaranteed to be really old technology. In fact, that article makes there scheme sound like little more than what ad agencies have done for decades.