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Comment by sbecker | Hacker News Reader

Instead of signing up and cleaning their data for them, or "opting out" by installing their special cookie which continues to track you around the internet, opt out the right way: block all ad networks via a browser extension like Disconnect or Ghostery.

More options and tools here: http://lifehacker.com/the-best-browser-extensions-that-prote...

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Not really. What most opt-out cookies do is that they have a "DO NOT TRACK" or "IGNORE" in the cookie fields.

Let's say you run a DMP, you think you can be smart by tracking people with cookies that have a "DO NOT TRACK"==True field.

Very soon though, you will be deluged by more noise than signal, and it quite literally becomes useless. It's honestly easier for companies to not track people who have a opt-out cookie.

Source: Wrote a prototype DMP for my company once

I was curious as to what Acxiom's cookies actually look like after opting out. With a fresh Chrome Igcognito session, following through the opt out process, I get 20 cookies. Plenty of unique GUIDs perfectly capable of tracking me through the internet, and no occurances of "DO NOT TRACK" or "IGNORE". Screenshot here:

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/950/d2ys.png

Also, can you define DMP? I did do some googling first, and I'm not sure which acronym you're referring to.

EDIT: Found it. DMP stands for Data Management Platform. For anyone else: http://www.adopsinsider.com/online-ad-measurement-tracking/d...

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