If you have spent any time researching a product, you have likely been annoyed to find targeted ads for that product or something similar showing up on pages as you browse the Web. These targeted ads are delivered based on your online activities as well as other factors like race, sex, age, level of education, income level, employment, economic status, personality, attitudes, opinions, lifestyle, and other interests. It can feel a little insidious but fortunately there are steps you can take to prevent or opt out of targeted online advertising.

Your first step should be to install an ad blocker on your web browser such as Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer or AdBlock extension for Chrome or Safari. These ad blockers can be customized to whitelist your favorite sites or you can choose to block all ads by default. They work automatically in the background and are a good baseline defense against malvertizing.

Secondly, you can opt out of targeted advertizing. The Digital Advertizing Alliance is a consortium that aims to help control Web ad content. Companies that elect to participate in the DAA have to allow users to opt out of their ads. To opt out the DAA offers a tool called WebChoices that scans your PC or mobile device for 134 different companies’ targeted advertizing practices to see if they affect your equipment. Once the scan is complete you will be presented with a list of found advertizers. You can select to opt out of individual companies or select all. Two points are worthy of note. First, by opting out, users will still see online ads. They just won’t be specifically targeted ads. Secondly, the opt out is browser based so if you opt out while in Chrome, you are only opting out of targeted ads while browsing in Chrome. If you use other browsers, or other devices, you will need to go through this process on each of them.

There will always be online ads associated with websites because without advertising many sites wouldn’t make money but by taking these steps you can reduce the number of annoying ads that are targeted specifically to entice you.

For more information on solutions for running your businesses’ technology more efficiently, visit our website or contact Megan Meisner at mmeisner@launchpadonline.com or 813 448-7100 x210.