Hacker News Reader

Comment by mortehu | Hacker News Reader

You can disable Google's ad targeting at any time: https://adssettings.google.com/ You don't have to pay anything. What you get instead is untargeted ads, like ads for cars, potato chips, and shampoo, just like on TV. Personally I find those to be a lot more annoying.

Facebook's ad targeting can be similarly disabled under https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_s...

View on HN

So... I have to be logged in or have a Google cookie in order to not be tracked by Google. This is complete bullshit and worthless for anyone using private browsing.

> What you get instead is untargeted ads, like ads for cars, potato chips, and shampoo, just like on TV. Personally I find those to be a lot more annoying.

I'm genuinely curious: what's so much more annoying to you about untargeted ads? I've never found targeting to be effective at showing me ads that were genuinely better or less annoying.

I feel more comfortable with untargeted ads, since I can be much more confident nothing truly sneaky is going on, especially technology ever gets good enough to reliably manipulate me to buy more now.

>I've never found targeting to be effective at showing me ads that were genuinely better or less annoying.

I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I think the key difference is this statement. I had untargeted ads on for about a year and they were always irrelevant. Since returning to targeted ads, I now see things all the time that I'm at least mildly interested in (mostly startups and new services, and/or tools/software I want to try out).

I don't care if I'm being coaxed into buying more: the things they're tempting me with are legitimately interesting and I have the ultimate say on whether I buy it or not.

Untargeted ads don't give that choice: they're just always irrelevant to my interests.

I consider most advertising-delivered information to be suspect. I find about things I'm interested in organically, through interest-based websites and the like.

In any case, except for a few specific circumstances, I've rigorously used ad-blocker so I haven't had to deal with any ads at all. The last ads that I have seen were on Facebook, but even it couldn't seem do a good job, even though it's purportedly the master of targeting

"What you get instead is untargeted ads, like ads for cars, potato chips, and shampoo, just like on TV. Personally I find those to be a lot more annoying."

Really? I kind of despise the targeted Ads. They're typically poor quality, and often it's some website I visited months ago to look at one product constantly dangling that product in my face in a desperate attempt for me to come back and buy it.

Show me the cars and potato chips, please!

This is retargeting, and is pretty much the least sophisticated ad targeting out there.

For me I don't really care whether ads are targeted or untargeted. It's the data collection they use to target the ads that's the real concern. I suspect that's true for most people but for some reason these discussions are typically framed as targeted vs untargeted, which IMO misses the point.

That said, I also really don't like seeing ads at all.

Does this disable Facebook's data hoovering about you?

I wouldn't think so.

You can also disable Google's ads on some sites, https://contributor.google.com/

Sadly, Google Contributor is not available outside US. I am eagerly waiting for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com