Did you know that Facebook steals your browsing history and displays relevant ads? Facebook uses your browser cookies to show ads on products and services. Your browsing history is considered as the one that you are looking for, on the web. Although this way of showing you relevant advertisements is a way useful, on the other hand, such policy is a major concern breaking your privacy. Not just the social media giant, Facebook. Majority of the websites do display relevant ads based on your browsing behaviour. If you are more concerned about your privacy, you may prevent Facebook from stealing your browsing history. We have also added a way for other sites as well.
Online Behavioral Ads
Ads that show up on any website based on the activity that you have made on other websites or mobile apps is called as online behavioural ads or internet-based ads. Such type of advertising is an easy way for advertisers to reach you.
You may browse for an external hard disk on Amazon. This means that you are actually looking to buy an external hard disk on an e-commerce website. Sites that you browse places a file called "cookie" on your web browser. Using this file, other sites can show up ads based on the one you were browsing on some other website.
Internet is free
The place where you see fewer restrictions is the where you find more issues. Internet is free but your privacy is almost raped here. You indirectly sell all your personal information to a site. However, it is believed that a user could control their privacy on the internet.
Most of the advertising platforms uses AdChoices for displaying ads on websites. Have you seen the blue triangular icon at the corner of advertisements? The above picture is the advertising option icon for Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) which serves a lot of ad platforms to show up online behavioural ads.
Prevent Facebook From Stealing Browsing History
This feature will be set to grab your browsing behaviour initially though you are aware of such advertising methods. You can turn it off easily on Facebook. Visit the link given below this post to prevent Facebook from stealing browsing history.
Literally, Facebook isn't directly stealing your browsing history. They make use of DAA to show up ads that finds appropriate customers for advertisers who does advertising on Facebook.
Facebook provides an option to opt out of this online behavioural advertisements.
Make All Websites Not to Track / Steal Your Browsing Data
Online behavioural ads are pretty cool compared to the normal ads that come up which you usually don't want to see on your screen. When you find something that you are actually looking for, the advertisements becomes useful. However, it's a big privacy concern.
DAA provides a way to opt out ads for websites where you do not want to give those sites your personal information.
Links
- Prevent Facebook from stealing your browsing data - Go here
- See other websites that uses your browsing history to show up ads - Go here
What's your personal thought about online behavioural advertising? Feel free to share with us below.