How to stop ads from following you around the Internet

Tech Tip Provided Rick's Daily Tips

Have you ever noticed how ads for products or services you recently checked out online start following you from website to website as you browse the Internet?

If so, you know how Interest Based Advertising works even if you weren’t aware that it exists.
In a nutshell, Interest Based Advertising is a technology that allows advertisers to keep showing you ads for products and services you’ve shown an interest in even after you’ve moved on to a different website.

For example, if you were to spend a few minutes researching hotels for an upcoming Hawaii vacation and then head over to Facebook to check up on your friends’ latest activities, guess what you’d see?

That’s right, Facebook would show you ads for hotels in Hawaii.

Or if you were to spend some time checking out the latest Dodge Ram trucks you’d see ads for Dodge Ram trucks on the next website you visit.

That, my friend, is the absolute ultimate in “targeted advertising”.

Not only are the advertisers “targeting” folks who have shown an interest in their product or service, they’re targeting folks who literally just finished researching those specific products or services!

Some people like the concept of Interest Based Advertising because it helps them focus on the task of booking their hotel room, buying their new car, or whatever.

Personally, I find it just a bit creepy when ads for products or services that I’ve shown even a casual interest in start following me from website to website!

If you find it creepy too you’ll be happy to learn that you can easily turn Interest Based Advertising off for virtually all of the websites that use it.

Just be aware that disabling Interest Based Advertising won’t remove all the ads from the websites you visit. In fact, you’ll still see just as many ads as you saw before.
It’s just that you won’t see the same ads all the time and they won’t follow you from website to website.

You have the choice of opting out of Interest Based Advertising on each of your favorite websites individually or opting out of all of them at once.

For example, if you don’t mind Interest Based Advertising in general but you find them annoying when you’re using Facebook, you can disable Interest Based Advertising just on Facebook by following the instructions on this page.

You can find instructions for disabling Interest Based Advertising for most any website that uses it by searching Google for a term like disable interest based advertising on [website].
For example, to find instructions for disabling Interest Based Advertising on X (formerly Twitter) you would type this into Google:

disable interest based advertising on X

Pretty simple, right?

However, if you really dislike Interest Based Advertising in general it’s a lot better (and faster) to disable it on all sites that support it in one fell swoop.

Luckily, this is very easy to do by following the steps below:

Important: Interest Based Advertising uses browser cookies to decide which ads to show you. That means you’ll need to complete the steps below with every web browser you use and on every device you use.

1 – Visit http://www.aboutads.info/choices/ and wait for the “Status Check” to complete.
2 – Click Continue.
3 – Click the OPT OUT OF ALL button located at the bottom of the window.
4 – Visit http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/.
5 – Click the Manage My Browser’s Opt Outs button and wait for the “Status Check” to complete.
6 – Click the OPT OUT OF ALL button located at the bottom of the window.

That’s all there is to it. Although you’ll still see ads on the websites you visit, you should no longer see ads for the products and services you recently checked into following you around the Internet as you move from website to website.

Important: Again, since Internet Based Advertising uses browser cookies to determine which ads to show you you’ll need to complete the steps above with every web browser you use and on every device you use.

Bottom line: You don’t have to allow the same creepy ads to follow you from website to website. You can easily disable Interest Based Advertising by following the steps listed above for every browser you use on each of your devices.
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