How can I stop Targeted Ads?

jollyme

I'm finding it increasingly irritating that ads are appearing on my PC hotmail and other sites I visit based on previous searches that I have carried out.
How do I stop this happening? I'm using Google Chrome and Windows XP on a netbook. I'm not looking to change OS etc - as I'm a bit of a scardy cat when it comes to such things

GillsMan7

jollyme wrote: »

I'm finding it increasingly irritating that ads are appearing on my PC hotmail and other sites I visit based on previous searches that I have carried out.
How do I stop this happening? I'm using Google Chrome and Windows XP on a netbook. I'm not looking to change OS etc - as I'm a bit of a scardy cat when it comes to such things

It's 100% effective, but often deleting cookies (accessible via Chrome privacy options) will help reduce the number of targeted ads. You're not a GMail user, but GMail has ads that are based on words in your email, and there wouldn't be a way to avoid that I wouldn't have thought!

kwikbreaks

Amazingly Chrome supports an Ad blocking extension...

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom

If you were prepared to move over to FireFox you could run

AdBlock Plus which removes ads and Ghostery which blocks lots of tracking trickery. There are lots of other similar addons available.

BackOnTrack

I just add a list of adservers to my hosts file and also use the privacy mode by default when browsing (this mode doesn't store any sites you visit or cookies)

jollyme

Well, I've just deleted my browsing history and then tried incognito browsing... hmm seems to be running slowly - would it ?

BackOnTrack

Never noticed any change in speed for incognito browsing myself, even when running on my netbook

esuhl

You could try Firefox with a few add-ons: Adblock Plus (blocks adverts, tracking cookies, etc.), TACO (blocks tracking cookies), Privacy+ (allows you to delete flash shared objects), and maybe NoScript (allows you to build a whitelist of sites on which to allow scripting).