单项选择题

Websites that track your buying and browsing habits can seem to read your mind—but you haven’t seen anything yet. Future sites may attempt to gauge (判断) your personality, and tailor what they show you accordingly.
That’s the possibility raised by a new study of computer gamers, which has revealed that a player’s behaviour within the game imitate their real-world character traits. Using similar information from the internet as a whole, it might one day be possible to profile a web surfer’s personality.
Most sites currently present the same content and layout to everyone who visits. Some larger sites tailor content to individuals, but the rules they use to do so are crude. Yahoo has software that monitors the news articles that visitors click on, and suggests other stories accordingly. If the user is logged in, the software may also consider their age and sex when displaying links to stories.
Nick Yee and colleagues at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California reckoned this personalisation could be made far more sophisticated if websites could assess visitors’ personalities. He also had a hunch (预感) that the real-world traits that define an individual’s personality could be gleaned from their online behaviour.
The PARC team is now thinking about how activity on websites, rather than in games, could be used to gauge personality. They believe a few key factors, such as interactions with other users in forums or time spent exploring parts of a site, could unlock insights into a user’s personality. Other studies have shown that people who score higher for neurotic (神经过敏的) traits log on more often, but for less time, compared to other visitors.
With this information, websites might then tailor content to different personality types. At a retail site, for example, extroverts(外向者) might be shown user reviews whereas introverts would see a product’s technical specifications.
The team will have to tread carefully if it is to avoid unsettling users, who may see personality profiling as an invasion of their privacy. Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist for search at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California, says that his team has been alert to such concerns when developing its software. "We’re very careful not to be intrusive," he says.
Why are Raghu Ramakrishnan and his team being careful when developing the software