clipped from: arstechnica.com   

a/s/l? Xerox patent gives the answer


Companies may eventually be able to tell who we are, demographically, based on our Internet usage patterns alone. Xerox has come up with a method by which they can analyze a series of visited web pages in order to determine (at least) a user's gender and age based off of a cache of test cases, as outlined in a recently-awarded patent entitled "User Profile Classification By Web Usage Analysis."


The challenge in putting such a method into practice will be getting large numbers of users to agree to be tracked.