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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> Whether or not you "Like" things is irrelevant. The main purpose of that "Like" button is (IMHO) as a tracking cookie.

Exactly. Ditto google's 'free' analytics, every adsense impression and the +1 button.

Nice to see someone working at google establish this in such a straightforward way, such candor is pretty rare.

Most of the time all you get is some marketing bull about how you're being enabled to share your favorite things with your friends.

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AdBlockPlus and Ghostery are always the two plugins I install first on my Firefox.

http://adblockplus.org/en/

http://www.ghostery.com/

I like RequestPolicy because it blacklists all external domains by default and it's easy to whitelist them as needed.

https://www.requestpolicy.com/

After using NoScript for while, I realized that it was painful to whitelist every website I visited. My goal was different, I only want to block tracking scripts and cookies. This is why Ghostery is best suited to my needs.

Request Policy is really annoying for daily use. Lots of sites use multiple domains to load images or CSS or other static content faster. Using the Readability plugin helps. Just tap ` and the missing CSS doesn't matter anymore.

Also Adveristy and Anti Social subscription for AdBlock. http://code.google.com/p/adversity/

How is it different from Ghostery?

I feel bad running on adblock, and then gorging on cyanide and happinesss, xkcd, smbc, etc... One day I just might click on an add and make them some money.

Isn't it just easy to Opt-Out from Online Behavioral Advertising..

http://www.aboutads.info/choices/

> Ditto google's 'free' analytics

Or being logged into Chrome.

You don't even need to log in – just visiting a URL sends it to google. I'm not sure if you can even disable that despite all the predictive/protective/suggestive checkboxes in config – I couldn't figure out how to stop my dev domains from being leaked to google until I moved to chromium.

Keystrokes are sent to your default "search provider", so if you configure chrome to point elsewhere it will send your keystrokes to someone else. You can add custom URLs as "search engines" so just put in a non-existant domain, or DuckDuckGo, and it won't tell on you.

Bingo. Use chromium if you don't want Google to see everything.

Or Firefox. Or IE. Or Safari. Or Opera.

Sure, but then you have to use Firefox, or IO, or Safari, or Opera. It's not all great.

Google, Facebook and Twitter have made clear statements that this data is not used for tracking. ( see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870428150457632... and http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ads/#toc-serve ). So if it does (and I am not saying it doesn't) they would be outright lying.

Did anyone actually try to investigate if or to which degree this happening? It should be actually be possible to see if there is some correlation between the site you visit and the advertising you see.

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