Opting Out of On-Line Tracking
Here are some resources for limiting and opting out of on-line advertising and tracking. Right now there are a number of different services and techniques. Some only work with certain browsers, and work in different ways. Some probably even conflict with each other, since they often use cookies to prevent tracking cookies from being placed.
In reaction to growing concerns about this topic, you should expect to see more options appear. Whether we’ll ever get to a single “opt out” tool is a good question, both from a political and a technical perspective. If you know of other services or add-ons (especially for other browsers), please include them in comments, and I’ll add them to my list here.
Ghostery – Firefox add-on that lets you block cookies and other tracking codes from advertisers and other services. You can select these one at a time (and all at once if you want). Ghostery always shows you how many services you’ve blocked on any given page. Note that not all of these are advertising-related; some affect services that offer links to let you link to a web page from Twitter, Facebook, or similar pages; some are web site measurement (analytics) sites, etc.
AdBlock Plus – Firefox add-on that blocks many ads altogether. If you are on a web page where you want to see an ad (or some feature that looks to the add-on like an ad), its easy to unblock ads for that specific page, or for the entire web site.
Opting out from advertising networks. Here are some sites that let you do this; some also give you information showing what they currently know about you. Look for a link labeled “consumer opt-out” or something similar:
- NAI – Network Advertising Initiative. Lets you opt out of a large number of member networks.
- BlueKai. An advertising network.
- eXelate. An advertising network.
- Lotame. Yet another advertising network. Link takes you to their opt-out page (not as easy to find as on the ones above).
- Google Analytics. This link lets you download an add-on for various browsers, that prevents information from being uploaded to Google Analytics.
- Yahoo Ad Interest Manager. Controls ads on Yahoo sites.
