If you can spot what I find annoying about the following screenshot of an advert I keep seeing whilst browsing around, then you are fabulously geeky (like me):
Google is trying to teach me to suck eggs. They obviously know what Operating system I’m using so I thought they would be clever enough to detect what browser I’m using and serve me something more targeted? What scares me more is that I suspect they are actually paying someone for me to see that advert.
That is simply jaw-droppingly dumb. I’m sticking with firefox. Google’s been starting to creep me out these days. It’s like a huge, smiling, dribbling zombie staggering about repeating the mantra “I’m not evil, I’m nice!”. Ahem, I even have ambitions to ditch my gmail address one day too…
That’ll be Google’s “DoubleClick advertising cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web.” Bless ’em.
You may want to go into the Google Ads Preferences Manager, and click the link so that you may choose to opt out of the DoubleClick snooping at any time by using DoubleClick’s opt-out cookie… Here’s how:
From Google search page, click “2010 – Privacy” link at bottom of page, then “Google’s Privacy Policy” link on next page, then scroll down to the line that ends;
Imagine that… If EVERYONE’S Internet and “World Wide Web” usage was able to be constantly monitored and tracked 24 hrs/day… Why, no one would be able to trust the Government if that WAS the case, eh?
I’ve long suspected that the Google Ads Preferences Manager was a phony. I had gone into my browser so many times and found new entries recorded as my interests (usually quite laughable ones). Until three days ago, I was prepared to fault myself: maybe I had tinkered with the cookies, or maybe my browser upgrades changed the settings. So, three days ago, I began an experiment: make no changes and see if the opt-out, using Google’s own methods, “sticks”.
Conclusion: it doesn’t. Each day I have come back and found that, despite opting out the day before, Google has a new cookie in my browser.
Just to answer some queries that might come up: I haven’t set my browser to delete cookies each session, the cookies are set to expire in 2030, and I’ve even seen new Doubleclick cookies ignoring the opt-out appear during a session.
I’ve done this experiment on Firefox 3.6.15 and 4 RC1, on Vista and XP.
Regarding Tom’s initial post, I hate to say it, but advertisers do indeed have the means to target by location, browser and OS. We use OpenX at our company, and it has all these settings.