How to opt-out of the interest based advertisement

The price of free internet content is the advertisement. The online advertisement has evolved so much and is increasingly personalized. Whenever you visit a website, you would typically notice a display of very relevant advertisement. For example, if you shop for a camera or researched camera recently, you would notice that suddenly there will be advertisements about camera all around you wherever you go! That’s personalized and contextual advertisement. There are several tools to block pop-up ads in the browser, but recently I learned about two free tools that help you opt-out of interest based advertisement from the browser. It will help you stop the ads from following you!

These tools offer a single window to completely opt-out/ disable interest-based ads from the most popular advertising networks on the Internet.

Steps to completely opt-out of the interest based advertisement:

• Go to one of these or both sites, aboutads.info or networkadvertising.org
• Let it scan your browser to find all the companies that are tracking you for the interest based ads
• Choose all companies or select the ones that you would like to opt-out
• The tool will opt-out from interest-based ads from all the companies

   

  • ​​​​​These tools use cookies so you need to preserve browser cookies and use it on all browsers that you are using individually to be effective at all the places. If you remove or clean cookies, you may need to re-do above steps (no big deal).

Using these tools, you can opt-out from the collection of web viewing data for interest-based advertising and other applicable uses, by some or all of the participating companies. The companies participating in this opt-out tool provide transparency and choice to the consumers.