Public’s Rising Anxiety Over Data
Whose mining your data, tracking you, selling your personal and private data:
Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook as we all have seen sitting in front of congress
In-depth instructions on how to prevent your personal and private data from being mined
search engines track and collect a your private and personal data.
But that kind of tracking might not always be welcome, especially when it means that you have ads following you around the internet from a site. Or maybe you just don’t like your data being collected.
First, navigate to myaccount.google.com, which can also be accessed from the Google homepage by selecting the little ‘grid’ icon in the corner next to ‘Images’, and selecting My Account.
Under ‘Personal info and privacy’, select ‘Ads settings’, then ‘Manage ads settings’ to get to the main ads dashboard.
To turn interest-based ad targeting off completely, toggle ‘Ads personalization’ from ON to OFF. If you don’t want to turn ad targeting off altogether, but want to fine-tune it, you can uncheck certain options from the ‘Your topics’ checklist lower down, until only the relevant topics are left.
To permanently save your opt-out preference, there is a link right at the bottom of the page which allows you to install the DoubleClick opt-out plugin. This will keep your opt-out status for that browser even if you later clear all cookies.
You can go one further than this and disable ad personalization for the Google ads you see when you’re signed out and across other online ad networks that work with Google. To do this, select ‘Visit AdChoices’ at the bottom of the page. This will take you to a new page that displays a list of different companies and whether they are currently delivering ads based on your interests.
You can then toggle individual companies on or off, or to disable ad tracking for all companies, scroll down and a dialog box will appear with the option to ‘Turn off all companies’. (You will need to have Javascript enabled in order for the page to work properly).
There is one other way that you can disable ad personalization on Google, if you’re a user of Google Chrome. Navigate to your browser settings (accessed by selecting the three vertical dots icon in the top-right corner of your screen) and select ‘Show advanced settings…’
Under ‘Privacy’, select ‘Send a “Do Not Track” request with your browsing traffic’. The effect this has will depend on whether a website responds to the request, and how it is interpreted, but some websites will respond by showing ads which aren’t related to your browsing history.
