Recently there has been a number of articles and focus on tracking cookies used by online advertisers and concerns around privacy. Most of these companies use tracking cookies and track your online usage and then serve up advertisements based on this data.
Obviously, you don’t want companies tracking all of your online activities and till now the only option is to delete cookies periodically (I prefer to use CCleaner once a week) or use private browsing options in your browser.
I came across a site (via an post on ZDNet) called the Network Advertisement Initiative, which seems to be an association of these advertisement companies. They have a page for Consumer Opt-out, where you can go an opt out of having tracking cookies placed on your machine by member companies. Basically you get to opt out of around 60 companies in 2 clicks. (As of today, there seems to be some companies for which opt-out cookies do not seem to work, but most of them did)
Note: Opt-out works by placing an opt-out cookie, so that you don’t get the tracking cookie. So if you clean out your cookies, then you will need to come and opt-out again. Also opting out does not stop Ads from showing up, just that you don’t get a tracking cookie.
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