Waffle

Last month, I got a message from Google AdSense that told me it was time to speed up phasing out my remaining Google ads and in fact cancel my AdSense service altogether. The e-mail announced the introduction of "interest-based targeting" using the infamous Doubleclick Dart cookie, which tracks users' behaviour across multiple sites and keeps tabs on their interests. The message also suggested I update my privacy policy, which I do not have. I consider this technology to be invasive and the fact that I'm supposed to warn people about the invasive technology in a privacy policy confirms that. So I took my Google ads off my active pages and asked the kind people at one of my other ad providers, Webcomics World if they could take Google ads out of the fallback chain for ads they serve on my websites (they said yes, and I haven't seen Google ads coming from them since).

I also installed Google's browser extension for opting out of the Doubleclick cookie, though since I tend to use more than just one browser on my home box, it's probably time I dug out the giant /etc/hosts file again to protect myself at the operating system level.

There may still be some Google ads lying around here and there, in the older corners of my content empire that I no longer visit. Not for long, though; today, I finally logged in to AdSense to cancel my account. Google ads should be gone soon.

Tags: Adsense, Doubleclick

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Tech-geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.