All too often adverts you see online are your past come back to haunt you. Advertisers use tracking cookies to capture the web history of users and monitor usage of a particular site. That information is used to serve up adverts most likely to influence you.
But I discovered earlier this week that some advertising companies let you opt out of that tracking. Read on to find out how to free yourself from tracking.
First, though, consider why you may want to. There are two ways of looking at this. Either you believe the advertisers who say well-targetted ads are actually helpful to users, or you think it best that your personal information stay that way.
After all, the information ad firms gather can be enough to identify individuals. In 2006 AOL was embarrassed when supposedly anonymised search data made public was used to do just that. For a taste of what can be gathered and how it can be used, check out this post on a site that will guess your gender.
But now, to opt out:
To stop Google tracking and targetting you, visit this site and click "opt out". You will still see adverts, but they won't be based on your personal web use.
On this page you can opt out of targetted advertising from 17 advertising networks, including Yahoo's. It also shows you which of those services it covers already have a tracking cookie on your machine.
Yahoo also have their own dedicated opt out page, as do DoubleClick - a large online advertising firm acquired by Google in March. Visit this page and hunt for the well-hidden link, or click here to opt out directly.
The DoubleClick site includes a handy reminder of which "non-personally identifiable information" they will use even if you do opt out:
"Your browser type, internet service provider, information about the general content of the site or page displayed on your browser and other non-personally identifiable information provided by the site."
That's still quite a bit of information. And this company even questions whether the DoubleClick opt out is effective. They say it only affects cookie-based tracking and not tracking that uses the IP address of users.
The only way to protect yourself may be to set your browser not to reject 3rd-party cookies (find out how here), to prompt you to decline or accept every cookie any site tries to send you, or to regularly delete them. It's surprising hard it is to keep your web use to yourself.
The opt outs linked to above may be a good thing. But as pointed out at TechCrunch, these firms are not offering anyone the choice to opt into their tracking and targetting systems.
US politicians have said in the past that the law should restrict and regulate online tracking like this. Could the appearance of opt outs be an attempt to head off that threat? Whether it is or not, I expect the number of people that use them to be small. Let us know whether you chose to opt out or not, and your reason for doing so.
Tom Simonite, online technology editor Labels: advertising, google, privacy, security, webPosted by Tom at 2:51 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment