The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently had an interesting post about Google's "behavioral targeted ad" program. It's worth a read. Behavioral targeted ads are just about the creepiest kinds of ads, because they look at what you've been looking at online and advertise to you based on that. Sound invasive? You betcha! I take measures to avoid looking at ads whenever possible (the AdBlock Plus Firefox add-on is worth its digital weight in gold), so I was glad to see that Google had set up a couple of different ways to opt out of being advertised to in this way:
1) You can set your ad preferences in your Google account: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
(This means, however, that if you ever clear the cookies on your computer, which I do every now & then, you'll have to re-set that preference)
2) You can install an opt out plugin: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/
(only in Firefox & IE for now, but it's open source, so maybe other browsers will follow)
There's also a not-Google-specific Firefox add-on called "TACO" (it stands for "Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out"), which blocks advertising cookies from 37 different advertisers.
Posted by jspeer on April 18, 2009
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