
Opt Out From Online Behavioral Advertising By Participating Companies - jharohit
http://www.aboutads.info/choices/
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tomlong
Gives me some confidence in uBlock & Privacy Badger... The first time I ran it
there was 1 site tracking me (adbrain).. I adjusted my PB settings accordingly
and got 0. It's a useful site for calibrating those tools!

[http://i.imgur.com/hdReODM.png](http://i.imgur.com/hdReODM.png)

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salzig
you may also consider to switch on: Settings -> Show advanced settings ->
Privacy -> Content settings -> Block third-party cookies and site data.

~~~
branchless
any downsides to this?

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kuschku
Google+ Notifications don’t work on any Google sites except for
plus.google.com (so you can’t view your notifications on other sites).

But that’s it.

~~~
branchless
Thanks guys. Enabled!

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0xffff2
Is there any legitimate use for third-party cookies (which is all this seems
to analyze)? I disabled third-party cookies years ago and I have never noticed
any negative side effects at all.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
I thought I disabled ads in Safari by selecting, under cookies and website
data, "allow from current website only". But new cookies from domains I've
never visited keep spawning. What am I doing wrong?

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putlake
It's because unbeknownst to you, the sites you visit are requesting javascript
or a tracking pixel from these other domains.

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surferbayarea
People don't care. It is funny that smart people don't care about tech and ad
companies violating their privacy by collecting data and profiting from it.
But they have an issue with the government doing it to protect them. Perhaps
has something to do with the fact that silicon valley's success is based on
the advertising business model and violation of people's privacy.

~~~
rz2k
Someone's going to try to sell me something I'm susceptible to buying? So
what.

Authorities don't collect data on you to protect you, they are ostensibly
doing it to protect other citizens from you.

One of the reasons that "smart" people object to this, is that it could also
limit their ability to play a leadership role in civic life, if there are
people in positions of authority with different political philosophies or,
even worse, who are outright corrupt or dishonest.

Besides the obvious examples of abuse like the Nixon administration, I suspect
there are very few counties in the country that don't have at least one case
of someone in a sheriff department, school board, city council, etc that has
been caught using their rather limited access to information about local
citizens for the purpose of staying in power or for some form of personal
gain.

~~~
surferbayarea
This data should ideally be protected and owned by the individuals themselves
- not the government, not the ad companies, not Google, not Facebook. As an
individual who owns my data, I should have a right to decide who/when/how
accesses my data.

More than a question of privacy, this is a question of next-generation user
experience. If as an individual, my data from uber, google, facebook, visa,
amazon is all in one place I can give selective anonymized access to it to
different services that can leverage the collective data to provide better
user experiences to me.

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Animats
Facebook just broke their site if you have Facebook's social media plugins
blocked. Unclear if this is an anti-Ghostery measure or they just screwed up.
Their code uses "require", which is not standard JavaScript, and whatever
loads "require" needs a social media plugin.

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jharohit
Just finished scanning - seems like 126 ad companies where tracking me for
targetted ads! When I tried opting out, only 76 acknowledged. Just very very
troubling..

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Larrikin
I think the 126 is all companies participating in the program, not necessarily
the ones that are actively tracking your browser. The second tab contains the
companies tracking you. Luckily I only had 9 and was able to opt-out of all of
them.

~~~
jharohit
technically yeah - but a lot of amongst the 126 were showing a status of "No
status available" (or something along those lines). 126 seems like quite a low
number for it to be the TOTAL number of participating companies - I could be
wrong though..

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tjohns
Are you running an ad blocker? It seems to interfere with the status checks,
since it blocks all traffic to the networks in question.

Try temporarily disabling your ad blocker and trying again.

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peteretep
Between Privacy Badger, Self-Destructing Cookies, and AdBlock Pro (and a
browser cache which wipes itself on close), a grand total of zero trackers.
Woo woo!

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sudojudo
The page won't even load for me, that's good, right? Paranoid mode FTW!

Turning off NoScript and Random Agent Spoofer doesn't help. Still running:
uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, Disconnect, and BetterPrivacy.

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ashmud
HTTPS Everywhere (Firefox) is blocking this. I get the "third party cookies
blocked" message. When I disabled HTTPS Everywhere, it worked.

~~~
jharohit
and how many did you get?

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ashmud
I had nine. On another computer, I had eight (less Yahoo).

Both computers have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and the built-in Firefox
tracking protection.

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k2enemy
Also fun -- see what Yahoo thinks your interest are:
[https://aim.yahoo.com/aim/us/en/optout/](https://aim.yahoo.com/aim/us/en/optout/)

~~~
komali2
'Travel > Destinations > Middle East'

So I can assume Yahoo isn't the one watching this particular bit of my
internet traffic...

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deepsun
0 sites with
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) (it
blocks requests at OS level with /etc/hosts)

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dsr_
Privoxy raised a warning, not letting me go there without clicking through. So
I did.

uBlock origin prevented the site from loading anything interesting, and Self-
Destructing Cookies means it isn't leaving anything behind.

I think I'm fine, but how can I know for sure?

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jharohit
Based on other comments, seems like uBlock does the trick somewhat. But to be
sure - just uninstall both and then try again?

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occamrazor
Note that the opt-out option provided only opts out of tracking-based
advertising, not of browser tracking.

To avoid tracking by ad companies use uBlock, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, etc.

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hoopsho
Our project can help out here too... With Metiix Blockade (free as in beer) we
can see every request that is blocked, what url caused the blocked request as
well as protect each device in the network from tracking, ads, and malware
related websites.

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pessimizer
I think you can estimate how many companies are tracking you by noticing how
many things that you had to disable to get this page to work.

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CM30
Three sites were tracking me apparently, and that's with uBlock Origin active.
But I opted out of them regardless.

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eli
Kind of a misleading headline. Look through the list of third-party cookies in
your browser if you want to see who is tracking you. This is a list of ad
companies who have agreed to offer an option not to track you.

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mike_hock
And how do I know that they actually don't?

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chupy
They have to abide to this policy otherwise they probably get kicked out of
the advertising organisations.
[http://www.aboutads.info/enforcement](http://www.aboutads.info/enforcement)
\- You can report any misbehaviour here.

This does not mean that you will not see ads from them it means that they
should delete all profiling information that they have about you and serve you
just shitty regular ads.

