As if there weren’t enough reasons for Web-related paranoia, Xerox just patented a technique to get a demographic lock on you—age, sex, and possibly income—by just looking at the sites you have visited.
The patent explicitly describes the invention as a workaround for all of those pesky users who input incomplete, inaccurate or, God forbid, false demographic information. Of course, the thing will only work if the system can get ahold of a set of Web pages accessed by the user. That’s probably right about the point where the EFF steps in.
All-knowing browser [New Scientist]
