How to get rid of ads that follow you around the Internet

• Posted by pcwrt
• in How To, Security
• on August 12, 2018
• 2 Comments.

You’ve had the experience. You looked at something on a shopping site, then that thing follows you all around the Internet. It feels creepy.

Trust me, those companies take privacy very seriously – their privacy. You see, you looked at the pair of shoes you later bought. The shopping site knew that you looked at the pair of shoes. The advertising network knew that too. But when you bought the pair of shoes, the shopping site kept that a secret. The advertising network didn’t know that, so it followed you around the Internet showing the same pair of shoes you already bought.

How can advertising networks follow you around? There are many ways. Here’s a good write up:

How cookies track you around the web and how to stop them

Chris Yiu had a very informative thread on twitter detailing the multiple ways advertisers can follow you around.

But how can you stop them from following you around? With so many always connected gadgets around you, and so many different ways to snoop on you, there’s probably no way to completely avoid it, at least no easy way. However, there are things you can do to eliminate some of the tracking:

1. Block third party cookies in your browser. This does not require any additional tools, but probably not very effective.
2. Install the Adblock Plus plugin for your browser. Adblock Plus is the most popular browser plugin for blocking ads. It can be quite effective at blocking the attempts to follow you everywhere.
3. Buy a Raspberry Pi board and install Pi-hole to block ads on your whole network.
4. If you use a pcWRT router, you can enable whole network ad blocking by checking the “Enable Ad Block” box on the “Access Control” page. You can either enable ad blocking for all profiles, or leave it off for some profiles. If a certain domain is falsely blocked, you can add it to the white list to bypass blocking.