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AdChoices is a program by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), a consortium of digital advertising groups.
You may never have known this option exists, even though its been around for a decade.
AdChoices offer was tempting.
If only it had turned out to be so easy.
I hit the button to opt out of all of them, and we were off to the races.
At the end, I got a report: 38 companies had processed my opt-out.
It said there may be a temporary technical issue with those.
Firefox blocks third-party cookies by default.
Since I dont actually use Brave regularly, I didnt bother trying to make it work.
I would not be defeated.
I re-ran the request a half-dozen times on Chrome, each time getting closer and closer to full opt-out.
But I never reached it.
I was only able to get up to 125.
Potential failures are regularly monitored and reported so that companies can address configuration issues, Mastria said.
It was a system integration problem the company was previously unaware of.
A few days later, he let me know it was fixed.
On my end, it still wasnt working.
Two were the same companies that had persisted on Chrome, Adstra and Pulpo.
The third was KBMG.com.
Did I end up sending a company I had never previously heard of my drivers license information?
Yes, because apparentlythatshow privacy works now.
Astra and Pulpo didnt respond to my emails.
Was it just me?
I did a little more research and found the problems Id had opting out werent new.
The DAAs opt-out portal has been criticized practically since it launched in 2010.
Difficult to navigate to actual opt-out page.
Not obvious that opting out of all trackers requires switching out of default tab on opt-out page.
Participants incorrectly believed that they were opting out of tracking.
Participants did not realize that deleting cookies nullifies opt-outs.
Participants unable to confirm opting out was effective.
Jason Kint, CEO of the online publishers industry group Digital Content Next, gives the site poor marks.
He takes particular issue with the fact that it requires a cookie to work.
After spending a few days trying to opt out of personalized ads, where did all this leave me?
The companies not participating in the opt-out can simply go hog wild.
They can track me, load reams of personalized ads wherever I go.
In my opinion, such systems should offer an opt-in system.
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupand was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
