Google - adverts

[Dave2002]

I have been finding using the web significantly more intrusive in recent weeks - with many apparently relevant adverts appearing in articles which I read. I really don't want all these. There is a Google page which allows one to set interests etc., or to opt out - but "opt out" isn't really a full opt out - they still bombard you with adverts, but just ones which may be less relevant. Although one might think that "relevant" adverts would be better than random ones, I'm beginning to wonder it they are in fact more distracting and subversive.

I had a choice of posting here or on the Techie forum - I thought this may be of more general interest.

I am becoming very much less enamoured of Google as a result of this and other factors. What is scary is the part of the Google profile page where it claims to have worked out your interests, your age, gender etc. I also personally think they link the system to email - so I may decide to give up on gmail in the not so distant future.

[Frances_iom]

... I also personally think they link the system to email - so I may decide to give up on gmail in the not so distant future.

why think - they do - old but true statement if a service is free you are the product - catch is any mail sent to a gmail address puts the sender into a Google database - Farcebook is even worse - why people want to give so much personal info to a company (whose owner strongly defends his own family's privacy but is happy to exploit other users) defeats me - try DuckDuckGo as a search engine - if you don't use facebook block it in your hosts file as all those facebook icons dotted around the web are tracking beacons registering your reading of the hosting page.

[Dave2002]

why think - they do - old but true statement if a service is free you are the product - catch is any mail sent to a gmail address puts the sender into a Google database - Farcebook is even worse - why people want to give so much personal info to a company (whose owner strongly defends his own family's privacy but is happy to exploit other users) defeats me - try DuckDuckGo as a search engine - if you don't use facebook block it in your hosts file as all those facebook icons dotted around the web are tracking beacons registering your reading of the hosting page.

Thanks. I don't use Facebook as I consider it really problematic, and I think users can expose themselves to dangers they don't realise. Maybe the film Social Network is not a true representation of the characters, but it certainly didn't endear me to Mark Zuckerberg, and the film seemed to confirm my dislike of the system he developed and exploited.

However, I didn't realise that simply looking at the hosting pages could aid the trackers. Is there an easy way to block this in OS X?

It seems that Mac OS X uses a similar hosts file system to other systems - Unix, Linux. I'll post some details on the techie forum in a while.

Re google and email - I've known that the sidebar adverts in mail are linked to content for years, but now it seems that Google links this to general web browsing etc. as well. If anyone doesn't believe this, start a conversation with a friend in another part of the UK (or world) and watch the adverts. I tested this by "discussing" beer and a possible meeting with one of my contacts, and within a very short while adverts for pubs and restaurants in Cornwall started to pop up.

[subcontrabass]

However, I didn't realise that simply looking at the hosting pages could aid the trackers. Is there an easy way to block this in OS X?

Try using Ghostery ( https://www.ghostery.com/en-GB/ ) to block trackers. This is a browser add-on and works on most systems.

[Dave2002]

Try using Ghostery ( https://www.ghostery.com/en-GB/ ) to block trackers. This is a browser add-on and works on most systems.

Thanks - I might try that.

I have to say that the adverts are continuing, and now getting very intrusive. Clearly someone/something is spying on everything I do - as well as GCHQ and the NSA. I am really getting very fed up about this. I do wonder if my web requests are being diverted before eventually the page I want is fetched.

[Dave2002]

Ghostery does seem to help, though it's a great concern that I now have to actively stop all these dogy sites trying to be clever and track my browsing so that they can serve up adverts. I'd much rather have a complete ban on all this kind of activity, or maybe a pretty powerful switch which does hundreds of sites all in one go.

This seems yet another area where the internet has developed in ways which are rather less than desirable.

[Dave2002]

There must surely be two parts to this display of adverts.

1. Track me to find out what someone else thinks I might be interested in.

2. Select an advert from the pool found by 1, and display it on pages I view.

I would really like to stop this by preventing both 1 and 2, but it seems very desirable to me to prevent 1 first. If tools such as Ghostery find that there are trackers accessed in web pages isn't it a bit late at that stage, and operation 1 will already have been carried out?

Enough to drive one to give up the Internet altogether - though perhaps not yet!

[Frances_iom]

one simple trick is to use No Script (firefox extension) to turn off Javascript unless you allow it for specific sites - avoid Google searches (eg use duckduckgo or even Bing) and use your hosts file to block access to many advert servers - another is to turn off images - however many sites will probably fail re Javascript as the tracking of users is why they exist in the first place.
There is much discussion on web re various approaches but you may need to get a new internet personality (eg change ISP) to avoid an already built dossier held by Google etc

[Dave2002]

one simple trick is to use No Script (firefox extension) to turn off Javascript unless you allow it for specific sites - avoid Google searches (eg use duckduckgo or even Bing) and use your hosts file to block access to many advert servers - another is to turn off images - however many sites will probably fail re Javascript as the tracking of users is why they exist in the first place.
There is much discussion on web re various approaches but you may need to get a new internet personality (eg change ISP) to avoid an already built dossier held by Google etc

Trouble is, for most "mere mortals" they won't know about this, and in any case it's a faff even for people who are knowledgeable.

That Ghostery tool is frightening, even if it does perhaps shut the door afterwards. There are just so many trackers - I really recommend that people here install it (I hope that it, itself is not malware ...) just to see what's going on. OTOH, don't do that unless you want to be scared witless.

Is Privatelee (https://privatelee.com/) also any good? I've now set duckduckgo - https://duckduckgo.com/ - as my preferred search engine in Firefox.

We are now getting into what some might call deep doodoo about these issues.