Opt Out of Google Targeted Advertising

by Oscar Sodani

March 17, 2009

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

Google recently announced that they will now target ads to your personal habits and preferences. How do they do this? By tracking you as you visit sites across the Internet. While some people like having more relevant ads, others find this practice to be creepy. But there are some people out there looking out for our privacy - the Electronic Frontier Foundation has worked with Google to make sure that you can opt-out of this tracking mechanism. We'll show you how.

Tracking Cookies

Tracking cookies (also known as third-party cookies) are cookies that advertising websites use to track you as you visit different sites. For instance, if you visit a site like CNN, they may get their advertising from (the fictional) "ACME Advertising", so ACME would place a cookie on your computer marking that you had visited CNN and seen their ad. If you go to another website, say, FoodNetwork.com, and they ALSO use ACME advertising, then ACME, by looking at your cookies, knows that you are interested in news and food. Multiply this by every website that uses ACME, and you can understand the implications of tracking cookies.

In this instance, Google is the ACME advertising company.

Browser Plug-in

What they have done is to create a plug-in for your web browser. The plug-in only works for the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, however. If you use Google Chrome, Opera or Safari, you'll need to use a work-around.

However, if you do use Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, click here to go to the plug-in download page. Click the button to install the plug-in, then restart your browser.

However, you should also disable "third-party cookies" as an extra privacy step. For Chrome, Opera and Safari users, this is their only option.

Disabling All Third-Party Cookies

If you use Firefox, click open the Firefox preferences (Click Tools->Options if you are on a PC, Firefox->Preferences if you are on a Mac). Then click the Privacy tab and uncheck the option for "Accept third-party cookies".

If you use Internet Explorer 7, open Internet Options -> Privacy. Then click on the Advanced button and check "Override automatic cookie handling". Then set "First Party Cookies" to "Accept", and set "Third Party Cookies" to "Block".

If you use Chrome, click on the "Customize and Control Google Chrome" icon, and in the drop-down menu, select "Options". Then select the "Under the Hood" tab. Under "Cookie settings" select "Restrict how third-party cookies can be used".

If you use Safari, open Safari->Preferences and click on the Security tab. For the "Accept cookies:" option, choose "Only from sites you navigate to".

If you use Opera, click on Tools -> Preferences, then choose the Advanced tab. Under Cookies, select "Accept only cookies from the site I visit".

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