How to block behavioural adverts that follow you around while you browse
You've probably noticed recently that you keep seeing the same ad repeated time and time again on lots of different websites you've been going to. Over the last year or so it's been irritating me more and more - while I understand websites need ad revenues to survive, I also think that for me this is one step too far - particularly when the ad isn't relevant to me and yet I get presented with it every single day of my life!
A couple of companies I know and respect started using it, which has really affected how I view them. In fact Chargify (who we use at Aframe for some of our payment processing) were using it and I kept seeing their ads everywhere, despite being a customer!
I wanted a button next to these ads saying something like :"Yeah OKAY! Dude. I'm a customer of yours. Please make it stop", but apparently that doesn't exist.
So as of today I'm blocking all behavioural advertising and as far as possible, anything that tracks me while I use the web.
You might want to do the same. And if your company is using this kind of tactic to reach people, you might consider not doing it because it irritates your existing customers!
Here are some handy ways to get rid of these irritating behavioural ads that seem to follow you around the internet and just won't go away.
Clear out your cookies
Advertisers use a unique token that they give to you the first time they 'see' you by serving up an ad to your browser, called a cookie. Any subsequent view of one of their ads means they can connect your profile to where you've been previously based on that token stored in the cookie.
Depending on your browser, you should go to your "settings" and remove cookies once in a while. Removing all cookies will also remove them from legitimate sites where you do actually want them, so it'll mean that you may have to log in to various sites again as a result.
An alternative to deleting all of your cookies is to go through each one in turn and remove any you don't know about. Or even better use a free utility that will do the job for you.
Clear out your Flash cookies.
This is sneaky - your Flash plug-in that is used to show you some ads (and to do nothing but identify you sometimes) also has its own set of cookies that some browsers don't know about when you clear out the other cookies. New Chrome and Internet Explorer users don't need to worry about this. But if you're on an older browser you should use a utility such as Flush.
Install Cookie Stumbler
Unless you want to do a regular manual clean-up of your cookies every once in a while, chances are you'll find that having a small utility installed that takes care of the job for you quite handy. Cookie Stumbler will clean all of these cookies up and run every once in a while in the background.
You'll also note that Cookie Stumbler will do a lot more than cleaning your cookies out yourself manually. It turns out that there are all sorts of sneaky, nasty methods being used to uniquely identify individuals - not least including certain colours embedded in images that are then cached by the browser and reported back to the advertiser. So even if you clear the cookies, a subsequent view of one of their images via an ad could result in the cookie being reset - back to square one, even though you removed it!
Cookie Stumbler handles this and a handful of other nasty, sneaky tricks so you don't have to. However, unlike the other things listed here, this is commercial software of the order of $18 per year for a subscription.
Install Abine TACO
The ad industry has apparently set up a scheme whereby your browser can opt out of tracking by saying "no thanks to tracking" on your behalf and storing a "don't track me" cookie. The ad network (should they be reputable) will honour this and not track your behaviour.
Or something like that. TACO is a free browser extension that does this for you and reports back to you, as you browse, which ad networks you have opted out of, and a bunch of other useful "no thanks, it's my data" things too.
TACO is available for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Install Ghostery
On top of TACO you can also get a report on anything that tracks you on any page, as you browse, and optionally block all or certain things from even running on the page. So if a site is using Google Analytics, or Facebook, or any of the many ad networks you can selectively allow and disallow these things from 'calling home'. I'd call this a "whitelist" - you can turn on what you want to run, and default everything else to 'off'.
Install AdBlock
If you're really fed up with the ads (I'm a pragmatist, so I'm not going this far) you can install AdBlock which effectively removes advertising from the pages that you see as you browse. In my experience it seems to slow things down and cause problems with video players, but you may have more luck.
With a combination of all of the above you should be able to get rid of a lot of these irritating ads and also keep tabs on who is tracking your behaviour and taking some control over what is stored about you online.