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Targeted Ads Online; How to Protect Yourself

Rich Brooks from Flyte New Media explains how these ads find you, and how you can protect yourself.

PORTLAND, Maine — Have you ever experienced visiting a website, store, or even having a conversation and then suddenly seeing an ad for a related product? Our tech guru Rich Brooks is here to talk about whether that's serendipity or just tech giants stalking you.

How do companies--everyone from Google and Facebook down to the local pizza joint--seem to serve up ads based on what we're talking about or searching for? Are they stalking us?

In a way. Online, our activity is constantly being tracked through many methods. This includes "cookies" which store information on your personal browser, and "pixels" which send information to big tech companies like Google and Facebook. In turn, other companies, presidential candidates, foreign governments, and even the local pizza parlor can then target you and show you ads based on your behavior and demographics.

Is this good? Bad? Is this Big Brother?

It really depends. I think all of us would prefer to see relevant ads vs. irrelevant ads. I don't need to see ads for diapers or baby formula, but I do want to know about new comic book movies, recent restaurant openings near me, or when my favorite bands are coming to town.

The problem is that a lot of companies and governments and "bad actors" have abused these tools and are gathering too much information on us. That's why you're hearing about new privacy laws being passed and why big data companies are making changes.

Speaking of companies making changes, Google has recently announced they're dropping support for 3rd party cookies in Chrome. What are 3rd party cookies and how does this impact our privacy?

  • First party cookies are cookies from the site we're on. They can be used to make the web work better. It's how sites remember your preferences and login info.
  • Third party cookies track visitors from site to site and often we don't know who's tracking us.
  • Blocking 3rd party cookies will make it harder for advertisers to track us online and give us a modicum of privacy.
  • However, it's important to know that Google is rolling this out on their browser over 2 years, while this has been in effect for Safari and FireFox browsers for a while.

If we don't want to wait 2 years or if we want to take better control of our online privacy, what can someone who's not very tech savvy do?

Good question, because there's a lot tech savvy people can do, with VPNs and other ways of masking your online behavior. But perhaps the simplest thing would be to is download the Tor browser, which is incredible safe and secure. It does run slower than other browsers, because it is anonymizing your activity.

Some people believe that if you run a browser in "incognito" mode you're basically invisible, but really you're just hiding your activity from the sites you visit, not your ISP, not your boss, and not anyone who checks your downloads.

Facebook has recently added a Clear History tool that's available to users. Is this a good way to protect our privacy online?

We'll see. Getting to the clear history feature on FB isn't as easy as they want you to believe, and I feel the majority of people just won't take the time to take action. And I went through the process of downloading all the information FB had on me...not just from what they gleaned from my activity on FB, but from all their partners. It was so overwhelming I really wasn't sure what to make of it or how to use it.

So, what would you recommend to someone watching this who wanted to protect their privacy online?

Again, use the Tor browser for surfing the web. You can also disconnect other sites from your Facebook account and stop using your Facebook account to log into other sites, instead, log in with your own email and create unique passwords for each site.

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