Have you heard about the recent hullaballoo around Facebook announcing that they will start offering up users’ Web Behavior for better targeting of online ads? Yeah, it is a real thing that has actually been around a bit. But Facebook is able to gather much more precise info than about any other company, mainly by tracking your web habits while you are logged in to their platform. They know everywhere you go, and everything you do.
Kinda scary, right? Facebook has a history of overtracking its users’ online habits, all the way back to tracking purchases on Amazon, and maintaining date on surfing even when you were completely logged out. They generally apologize for the misunderstanding, promise to fix it, and then find another way to do it. And here is the another way.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
For example, if a user visits an electronics site to research TV sets, Facebook might record that activity and use the information to target the same user with ads for TVs the next time they visit Facebook. Facebook could also target that user with ads for other electronics or complementary products.
As Facebook notes, this form of behavioral targeting is commonplace around the Web. But what sets Facebook apart is the sheer number of sites it collects data from. Its pieces of code and social plugins (such as its “Like” button) are embedded across a huge range of websites, potentially giving it a highly detailed view of its users’ activities outside of Facebook
But there is hope, at least for a couple of months before all of the advertisers change their wording and renege on their promises. According to ZDNet:
So if you want to avoid these new ads you’ll need to go through the Digital Advertising Alliance’s, (DAA) own privacy portal. As it happens, the DAA is the group whose withdrawal from the W3C led to the end of any effective work on DNT.
The DAA’s “privacy” portal will then scan your web browser’s cookies and history — oh the irony! — and tell you what advertising networks will honor your request to no longer receive “interest-based advertising from some or all of our participating companies.” You can choose to opt out of Facebook’s new targeted ads as well as tracking ads from many other advertisers such as eBay, Google and Microsoft.
Just to reiterate, you will need to go to the DAA’s privacy portal and then manually ask advertisers not to track you. If you do this, be sure to do it for each web browser that you are on, since it is browser specific. And don’t expect it to have a ton of impact, since it is a voluntary thing on the part of the advertisers.
Good luck.