Ever had the feeling that all your online activities are being tracked these days? Did you search for something and access a different site to see ads related to your search show up, based on the search pattern and trend?
If you don't like this feeling, then you may have a way out
The raising privacy concern, recently made the FTC to report that it wants to fight the way the tracking cookies work. For people who do search, shopping and access various sites it is evident that our online sessions and activities are tracked at various levels. In most cases the targeted ads are displayed based on tracking cookies that are stored per user either online or in local cache.
Following the announcement from FTC, Mozilla and Chrome have taken the first steps to address the public concern (and FTC's). The approach suggested by Mozilla is not available as of today, but is a model in which the user preference to opt out of the tracking set in the browser and this setting is passed on as header information to the commercial website and the ad servers. If the user has opt out enabled, then the ad server needs to sent normal ads, else will send targetted ads.
If you don't like this feeling, then you may have a way out
The raising privacy concern, recently made the FTC to report that it wants to fight the way the tracking cookies work. For people who do search, shopping and access various sites it is evident that our online sessions and activities are tracked at various levels. In most cases the targeted ads are displayed based on tracking cookies that are stored per user either online or in local cache.
Following the announcement from FTC, Mozilla and Chrome have taken the first steps to address the public concern (and FTC's). The approach suggested by Mozilla is not available as of today, but is a model in which the user preference to opt out of the tracking set in the browser and this setting is passed on as header information to the commercial website and the ad servers. If the user has opt out enabled, then the ad server needs to sent normal ads, else will send targetted ads.
This approach from Mozilla is more for ideal conditions in which all commercial sites, ad servers play along to create a online space for best consumer experience. We know that this is not going to happen and is not going to be reality.
The solution from Google (Chrome) is by providing an extension (Keep My Opt-Outs). This extension remembers the sites from which the user tries to refrain from having personalized ads and hence prevents the definition of tracking cookie. In addition to that Google also provides the Ad Preferences Manager (http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/) where the user can control the different profile information that is getting tracked and also gives the user the choice to opt-out or manage profile information that can be added / removed.
While I see the personalized ads in some websites that get my attention, with the opt-out we are going to get some generic ads. We are going to have ads anyway, so is it better to have something useful and more relevant than having junk and useless ads?
It is a personal choice and for most consumers who don't understand the background details, it is going to be driven by mass propaganda. If everyone is going to cry foul and claim privacy is lost, then the mass is going to do opt-out. I think I am going to just leave it the way it is, but monitor what is being tracked instead.
Author: Vinod
Source: Engadget
No comments:
Post a Comment