Why does Amazon have ads?

How do you stop Amazon Ads and Data Leaks?

• I have noticed while searching or shopping for items on http://Amazon.coit some how magically turn up on my other pages i surfe later on as ads.( Chrome browser) How do you stop this direct data leaking to Amazon?

• Answer:

  Creepy, right? Imagine you go to a store (brick and mortar) and ask about cargo pants, but they don't have your size or you don't really like how they fit. Then, you continue walking down the street and people you've never seen before walk out of other stores as you pass-by offering cargo pants in different sizes and colors... I don't think I would want to walk down that street ever again, yet that is the strategy that marketers have chosen for online sales. Aside from that, though, what you are asking for is not what most people would want to do, or have the know-how to do. Many websites actually stop working or become clunky, and you are harassed by others telling you that "you are not getting their full experience" unless you enable cookies. The first thing you should do is to disable cookies. Disabling all cookies is too extreme and will be counter productive. Websites won't remember you at all. You'l have to type everything each time you go there to login or similar things, like reading notifications from Quora ;). You can, however, disable cookies from third parties. You will need to do that in every browser you use, and the instructions are different for all of them, but you should be able to search for those instructions easily. There's something else that has very limited reach, but can help a wee bit: some browsers allow you to ask websites not to track you. This was an initiative that never really took off, but some sites do acknowledge it and back off. A more effective measure is to block all ads. There are lots of products out there for this which have different degrees of effectiveness. All of them require fine tuning and regular updates, which are beyond the abilities of most people. Plus, in many cases, people actually want to get ads. Ad blocking solutions exist for each device or for your entire home network. Even though you can take some steps to increase your privacy online, you must remember that the web was not designed for privacy. Everything can and is tracked. Many companies make money from that reality, and it is what fuels most activity online. That's why Google and Facebook are the largest names out there. They have made it their business to track you and know as much about you as possible, and in turn, they sell that information to others who may want to know why you didn't buy those cargo pants in the first store. It may not be as interactive or intrusive as the movie Minority Report, but these companies do know a lot about you and profit from that knowledge all the time. Marketing companies have tracked everyone from a long time ago and they probably know a couple of shocking secrets about gramps, who doesn't even have an e-mail account. Google's massive data gathering on consumers is by no means a new idea. It is simply the latest incarnation of a business that has thrived for decades in the US and other similar economies. On the other side, these companies have played a big part in shaping most products we use today. They have also funded and continue to fund large portions of the Internet and our consumer society. The concept of having everything for free in the Internet has survived only because of people's willingness to share personal details online that can later be used to market directly to them. After that detour, I'll close by telling you that Chrome is a bit harder to get around because it is a Google product and, arguably, has been designed to track you. It sends your keystrokes to Google from the address/search bar and provides the convenient auto-complete, but it also means Google knows which websites you visit, from where, when and how often. If you sign in to your Google account, they also know which devices you use and from where. Having said that, you can change your default search engine (only a few choices for the mobile version, though) and you can turn off auto-complete (I'm not sure, but I think you can't even turn this off in the mobile version of Chrome). These are things that most people are not willing to do because it's very convenient to pick a site from the list that appears when you type, not to mention that avoids misspelling the site and ending up somewhere potentially nasty. Hopefully changing your cookies setting will reduce a bit of the behavior but also remember that going online equals being tracked. It also means you are helping some of the companies that fund your online activity.