Permanently opt your browser out of online ad personalization via cookies | Hacker News Reader

Permanently opt your browser out of online ad personalization via cookies

chrome.google.com

77 pointsabraham37 comments

Google makes most of its revenue on advertising. Google's ability to target ads is a huge plus to its advertisers. Google still offers a way for users to opt out of this if they choose.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is 'Don't be Evil' in my books.

Modus tollens at its best.

'"For example", does not a proof make.' - sorry, can't recall the author

I subscribe more to to relativism :)

OT : Correct pronunciation of Knuth makes you nick less awesome.

Except that he's simply saying this is part of "don't be evil", not that because of this, Google are 100% non-evil.

wow I went to the url provided, http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ . To see what interests are associated with my cookie. Its amazingly accurate as to what my interests are. In all honesty its quite impressive.

Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you?

I was in the same boat as you but then I investigated what all it could flag on my account and realized that I tricked myself. My categories were actually closer to fortune-telling type stuff. 'You like video games', 'You like online videos', 'You like computers & electronics'.

But when I drilled down I found it missed lots of things it could flag me for. Google did not recognize I was a programmer despite me googling for various C apis and programming questions commonly. Last summer I spent a good amount of time learning to garden with much help from google but nothing about that category. I often google books for reviews rather than goto amazon.com directly.

Given the amount of interests I have told google about I am actually surprised that they have flagged me for such a conservative set of categories.

That said: it is nice to peek under the covers in such a convenient way.

Edit: And now I am, oddly, pausing before opting out. If you had asked me if I would have opted out before I had the choice I would have said yes. But now, given the choice to opt out, I wonder if I am actually giving up value. If I opt out do I lose something of value to me: having a better chance of that spacing being filled with something valuable rather than just noise. Is it a fair trade: My interests for a better signal-to-noise ratio? Before I had the choice it felt, to my human brain, that I was getting the short end of the deal. But now that I have a choice my human brain is wondering if it is a fair deal after-all. funny.

I agree with you in terms of how conservative these categories are, but my assumption was that these are the categories that are most likely to get you to click on consumer products that you'd be willing to act on most immediately. Example: the type of music I'm most interested was categorized correctly, and I tend to look for new music to purchase.

"Accurate in no false positives or accurate in it captured it's best fit to you?"

One false positive for me - Beauty - though that's probably my beautiful wife searching.

Regarding capturing me - not close. A few periphery interests (comics - because I have Dilbert delivered to my Gmail each day?), but not one business category despite the fact that I work as a business coach, write a business blog, used to edit and run social media for a national business coaching company, and spend a heap of time on HN and elsewhere reading business articles.

I also welcomed the awareness because it made me go 'meh'.

I agree, it has some things about me that are great for advertisers ("Shopping - Apparel - Casual Apparel - T-Shirts" -- I spend way too much on t-shirts) but it's also got some stuff I was once interested in for an hour but then never went back to, like "Audio Files & Formats" and then that are just plain wrong... "People & Society - Family & Relationships - Family - Parenting" (single male)

FWIW here is my list:

  Business & Industrial - Business Finance - Venture   Capital 

  Business & Industrial - Manufacturing 

  Business & Industrial - Retail Trade - Retail Equipment & Technology 

  Computers & Electronics - Computer Security

  Computers & Electronics - Programming 

  Computers & Electronics - Software

  Proxying & Filtering 

  Internet & Telecom - Email & Messaging

  News 

  Online Communities - Social Networks

  Online Communities - Virtual Worlds 

  Real Estate

It's pretty accurate but there are quite a few omissions and at least one weird false positive (real estate).

you must have clicked on the rent vs buy article

You can opt-out of all of the preference tracking ad networks from this site http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

I clicked the link to see what would come up for me, but got a page error. Then I realized that doubleclick domains have been zeroed out in my hosts file for some time, as well as numerous other tracker domains.

Ghostery is similar, but blocks the information used to do this kind of tracking. I guess it makes sense to use both, although personally I trust the Ghostery approach more because it doesn't rely on the tracking companies keeping their word (for example, it would be difficult to detect if they still recorded you use, but just stopped personalizing ads).

http://www.ghostery.com/ (not involved, just a happy user)

So ad-personalization is bad because?

I would much rather see personalized and relevant advertising then random garbage.

I would rather not be stalked and have all my personal and private information available to people trying to sell me crap I don't want or need.

I'd rather see no advertisements.

No offense, but without advertisement, then how does Google pay the bills? It's one thing to not want to be stalked, it's another thing to use a free product and complain about the company making money from even showing adds on the side of the page....

I'm not shutting down Google. I am disabling ads for me. The two are not identical.

If everyone did as I do, then Google would have problems. But they would have them anyway, because I don't follow ads. On the other hand there would also be one hell of a lot more free software. And everyone would have a shaved head and a beard.

"I would rather not be stalked and have all my personal and private information available to people trying to sell me crap I don't want or need."

I don't mind the ads much; sometimes (albeit not very often) they are actually useful.

What I mind is the idea that the same data could or would be used for more nefarious reasons, such as determining credit worthiness or "bad citizen" behavior.

The last part of the title, "via cookies" still concerns me, ever since seeing the evercookie project (http://samy.pl/evercookie/). There are so many other ways for sites to track users besides normal cookies.

This is a good start on Google's behalf. Hopefully this type of pluggin will evolve to include the long list of other methods sites use to track users.

The ~146 sites it opts out could just be added to /etc/hosts. This site has a much more comprehensive and longer list of pre-formatted and commented/explained list of sites you can just drop into your /etc/hosts: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

What's the benefit of opting out? Opting Out results into Google not providing better ads to you; Google may still track and categorize users and the collected information may still be used for other uses (e.g. personalized search/news, personalizing its own ad campaigns).

If you are a Firefox user, check out Beef Taco - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-tar...

If you're interested in other extensions/plugins at all, have you seen http://donttrack.us/ ? The site is one giant ad for DuckDuckGo, but it has some useful links at the bottom.

I am slowly beginning to cut Facebook some slack after seeing how Google manages to master the art of privacy setting obfuscation.

I'm a "superuser" and have used Google for who knows how many years, and I was apparently still in the opt-out program.

If Larry Page needs a cause that will set him and Google apart from Eric Schmidt, here's a good place to start.

"Don't be creepy." How about that?

I wouldn't cut them slack just because someone else's arguable worse.

I don't have a Facebook user, so there's a lot of slack to be cut, before I get to that step. :)

It just puts Facebook in another perspective on my relative axis.

Install Disconnect (written by an ex-Google engineer).

http://www.disconnectere.com/

It blocks 3rd parties and trackers from a variety of places, not just Google.

Hot on the heels of Firefox' "Do not Track" announcement ... momentum is building. http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-fire...

The first DNT proposal surfaced after a bunch of privacy advocates met a few years ago in California. It's great to see the idea get refined and adopted.

While many seem to think this is a good move, I personally think it should be opt-IN, with the default action of no cookie being needed to turn it all off.

I block all cookies for Google by default anyway and virtually all ad networks and tracking are blocked too (check out Ghostery for Firefox).

I am more concerned with some of its categorization of my interests!

Reference - Humanities - Philosophy What happened to philosophy being the queen of sciences?

Science - Mathematics Mathematics is a subtopic of science? Science is impossible without math.

Why not just block all 3rd party cookies in your browser config? That easily possible with Firefox and Chrome and almost all sites work fine without 3rd party cookies. Seems that 99% of the use-cases are tracking related anyway.

Anyone else having hotmail and yahoo email issues after installing? Login info is no longer being saved. Each time I shut all chrome instances I have to re-enter the info to login. Before it was stored in a cookie.

I found a better solution: set your browser to forget all its cookies when you shut it down. Use different providers for webmail, feed reading and search.

No opt-out cookie required!

I have been wondering about two things:

1. Is it possible to not use a cookie to opt out?

2. Why must we opt out, instead of opting in.

I don't want to opt out as it'll turn adverts from rarely useful to never useful.

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