Keep My Opt-Outs Lets You Opt Out Of Interest Based Ads On the Web

You might know that in order to serve the ads on the web that align with your interest and seem relevant to you, companies make use of ad-tracking browser cookies. Like any other cookie, these cookies stay in your browser, track your browsing habits and serve ads accordingly.

Now, whenever anything on the web tracks browsing habits, no matter how anonymously it does, there are some voices raised against the practice citing privacy issues. Although some of the concerns are genuine, I personally don’t think it’s a big concern because there’s hardly any privacy left on the web these days. Anyways, so coming back to these tracking cookies and concerns, Google has now released a Chrome extension that’ll help people stay opted-out of these tracking programs.

Let me first explain what do I mean when I say “stay opted-out.” There’s this thing called Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) which includes a number of big advertising networks. The purpose of this initiative is to give users the choice to opt-out of the personalized advertising we were talking about.

The problem though, is that these settings are lost if the browser cookies are cleared. So even though a user might have opted out, if he clears the cookies in his browser, he is rolled back to the interest based ad regime.

Hence, this extension called Keep My Opt-Outs was developed by Google. As the name suggests, this tool helps a user stay opted out of those ads even if he clears the cookies.

So, you could use this extension if you don’t want any tracking cookie in your browser. However, there’s a downside to using this tool. Since a large part of ads on the web work using the interest based model, disabling that would mean that you would see repetitive and monotonous across most of the sites you visit. And that might be irritating.

Moreover, it could reduce the ad revenue of sites like the one you are reading now. Hence, it’s up to you to decide if you really want to go that route and use the extension. If you ask me, I don’t need it.