

Permanently opt your browser out of online ad personalization via cookies - abraham
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhnjdplhmcnkiecampfdgfjilccfpfoe

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51Cards
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.

~~~
babeKnuth
Modus tollens at its best.

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

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

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minalecs
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.

~~~
meta
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.

~~~
JacobAldridge
_"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'.

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andrewcooke
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)

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mkull
So ad-personalization is bad because?

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

~~~
babeKnuth
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.

~~~
ylem
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....

~~~
andrewcooke
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.

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rmorrison
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.

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genieyclo
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/>

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notnoop
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).

------
jmhobbs
If you are a Firefox user, check out Beef Taco -
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-
tar...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-targeted-
advertising/)

~~~
jonnytran
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.

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kmfrk
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?

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

~~~
kmfrk
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.

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babeKnuth
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.

------
jdp23
Hot on the heels of Firefox' "Do not Track" announcement ... momentum is
building. [http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-
fire...](http://www.futureofprivacy.org/2011/01/24/breaking-news-firefox-do-
not-track-advances/)

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.

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ck2
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).

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jawee
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.

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gst
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.

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forgotAgain
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.

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cmars232
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!

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kuahyeow
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.

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

