Jian Hu, a software engineer at Microsoft's research lab, discussed the company's progress at the World Wide Web 2007 conference in Banff, Canada, revealing that the software so far can accurately guess a user's gender and age.
He explained that the program gathers information to aid in its "guess" from a number of sources, including a new cookie program that catalogs visited websites, users' own computer caches, and proxy servers that record which, and when, websites were visited.
Hu told his audience that Microsoft's research team is working to refine the software's methodology to one day allow the program to accurately guess a user's occupation and even location.
The program looks at a user's web history and builds a profile of that user based on what websites he or she frequently visits. Based on probability, the program would identify a user as a female — for an interest in, for example, at-home breast exams — gathering more information on that user in a cascading pattern.
"This kills the anonymity of the Internet," technology law attorney Brandie Hawkins told XBIZ.
Hawkins said she believes wide use of software like this could have a "chilling" effect on Internet use.
"If you knew that if you sign up [on an adult site] as Bob Smith, and that [the software] can identify you based on patter, you wouldn't sign up," she said. "It would affect e-commerce, especially in adult."