Sunday, March 22, 2009

Opt Out of Google's Targeted Ads [Privacy]



 
 

Sent to you by David via Google Reader:

 
 


Google recently announced an ad-targeting system that tracks where you go on the web, and tailors future ads to your interests. Creeped out? You've got a few ways out of the observation tank.

While the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, pretty wisely, that the smartest move would have been to let Google's many users opt in to supposedly "better" ads, market forces mean that's just not going to happen. Still, Google does explain how it works, and gives you a preference, and a browser plug-in, that can keep behavior-snooping bots at bay.

Log into your Google account and mozy over to the Google Ads Preferences page, where you can hit an Opt Out button to put a cookie (identified and detailed) on your system that blocks ad monitoring and targeting. The downside, though, is that any time you wipe out your cookies (a pretty common move, especially amongst the privacy-conscious), that preference washes out with them. So Google also offers a Opt-Out Preferences plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox that auto-kills ad targeting. Good for those who use those two leaders of the market; kinda annoying for everyone else.

Know of a convenient alternative to the Big G's metric-conscious moves? Share it in the comments.




 
 

Things you can do from here:

 
 
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