Hacker News Reader

Comment by skystrife | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it makes sense for ad platforms to enable a "clear history" option just like our browsers do? That way you can say very clearly "the current model is wrong, please restart and try building a new one for me". That might also help this particular case: rebuild the model from scratch including only content going forward rather than backward. Should eliminate the baby ads effectively, right?

View on HN

Google at least let's you specifically go into ad settings and check/uncheck specific categories of things that you get ads about (that's an oversimplification of the process behind it).

I'm not sure how but one time I started getting a few ads in Spanish about toothpaste. I had also just found out about the ad settings page, and after taking the minute to remove the handful of wrong interests, the incorrectly targeted ads stopped.

Edit: Facebook allows it as well, here are the links for anyone that wants to do it now.

https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated

https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/

> Google at least let's you specifically go into ad settings and ...

... improve the tracking accuracy of your data in exchange for reducing your annoyance with ads

I mean right at the top of the page is a single switch that lets you turn off all targeted advertising if that's what you want.

But personally I like targeted advertising. Ads let me use services for no monetary payment while still providing income for the content creators, and I like seeing ads that are targeted towards my interests more than ads that aren't. And while it's not ideal that you might have to go in and change what your preferences are in cases where they get it wrong, I much prefer it over the alternative of all ads being "wrong" for me.

That'd work in this case, but would destroy lots of value when people like me would go in every few months and reset all my ad profiles. Then again, the total percentage of people who would care enough to go in and do that is probably pretty small.

I'm going to start sounding like I work for them, but Google already allows you to disable targeted advertising entirely, and Facebook at least let's you disable targeting for the vast majority of things (the major exceptions being age, gender, location, and the content of the page if I recall correctly).

I would immediately try to figure out a way to automatically clearing my advertising history as often as possible. So would other people; at least one of us would build an easy-to-use tool for other people to do the same.

Nice. And I could click it every 60 seconds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com