Your ability to block personalized ads is dependent on which web-browser you use.
Google Chrome
Chrome has a solution that you can implement right now, and it comes in the form of a browser extension. The extension works by automatically opting you out of any company that offers an opt out program, which Google says is over 50 companies including the top 15 largest ad networks. It won’t block ads (Google is not about to start helping you to block their ads), but the overly-personalized ads will now be replaced by generic, possibly repetitive ads. Here’s the link to the Chrome extension.
Mozilla Firefox
Firefox’s solution is still a “proposed†feature, meaning it will likely not be available until the next major browser release. What they are planning is a Do Not Track setting you can activate in the browser. When you activate it, it will send out an HTTP header to advertisers (well, their servers actually) that will tell them not to deliver personalized ads to you, and to only track your activity anonymously. Advertisers will have to choose whether to respect Firefox’s header (respectible ones likely will), and we will have to see how long it takes Firefox to implement this, but it is a promising idea.
Internet Explorer 9
The upcoming release of Internet Explorer 9 promises yet another solution to ad tracking. IE 9 will feature a “Tracking Protective Listâ€, in which you either blacklist or whitelist ad tracking from advertisers by domain. We will have to see how this is implemented for the end user, and how effective this method of stopping personalized ads is in practice.
In Summary
These are three different browsers with three different methods of preventing personalized ads. The Chrome extension is the only one that you can implement right this moment, but the Firefox and Internet Explorer 9 solutions should be coming soon. It is also likely that other browsers such as Safari and Opera will adopt or implement their own methods to prevent ad tracking. Whatever method you choose to use, it is definitely a good thing that we now have more options to protect our privacy and keep web browsing anonymous.
The site http://www.aboutads.info/choices/ claims to let you opt-out from personalized ads by 59 currently participating firms. It lists those which already have cookie-marked your browser. Is it for real?
I hadn’t heard of this site before, and it’s hard for me to tell from a quick browse how legitimate the site is. The Web of Trust extension seems to think that the site is trustworthy. The opt-out feature didn’t work for me in Chrome (it got hung up on the “checking status” screen), but in Internet Explorer it is giving me the option to opt out of several personalized ad companies’ tracking.
I won’t know whether it works until I try it and get a sense of the ads being served to me, but if it does work this seems pretty great.
I do have a question though of whether this opt out is permanent or whether it is something that you will have to redo every time you clear your cookies or restart your browser, since permanency is the justification for making opt-out a browser extension or a built-in browser feature.