Your Primer on the Online Advertising Tracking Opt-Out

One of our primary goals as postconsumers, and as people helping to educate others on how to separate themselves from the consumer-driven media machine, is to be aware of the tools that are available to us to help give control over the barrage of consumer marketers. Recently, both the Google Chrome browser and the Mozilla Firefox browser made tools available to users that would allow them to opt-out of having their behavior tracked for advertising purposes. If you’re still using Internet Explorer as your browser, now is the time to change to Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. To help educate you on these opt-outs, we’ve prepared this primer for you!

When you visit a website on the internet that sells products or has advertising, the website or advertiser often drops what is known as a “cookie” that then tracks your behavior on that specific website. It may track how long you’re on the site, what pages you visit, if you open a shopping cart and then abandon it or what ads you click on. Advertisers then use this data to create ads that are more targeted to your specific behavior and serve them to you so that you are more likely to purchase products. Increasingly, consumers have begun to consider this a violation of their privacy and have asked for tools to help them opt-out of behavioral ad tracking. So far, two browsers have created products for this purpose.

In January, Mozilla introduced its Do Not Track HTTP header. The header allows users to opt out of online behavioral tracking by advertisers (typically via cookies) with every click or page view in Firefox. To put that in perspective, Firefox is used by about a quarter of the world’s web users, so if everybody opted out of behavioral tracking, advertisers would potentially lose a quarter of their data. The tool has actually not been rolled out to the public yet, but when it is, for users who choose to enable it, websites will be told by Firefox that users want to opt-out of behavioral data tracking.

Google Chrome is offering My Opt Outs, which is an easy-to-use Chrome browser extension that, quite simply, lets users permanently opt out of being tracked online by advertisers’ cookies. The downside is that it only enables opt-outs from about fifty ad networks that already, via participation in the Network Advertising Initiative, let people decline targeted ads. Those advertisers, however, include Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Neither solution is perfect, and you’ll have to be tech friendly enough on your end to figure out how to install them. However, it does appear as though the internet is finally moving towards a solution that will allow you to control what advertisers know about your confidential online behavior.

Facebook, however, still makes us question where our information is going. That’s not keeping us off it though! Like us on Facebook – if nothing else Facebook will know that you don’t like mindless consumerism!